The Barrister Group is set to launch a new technology‑enabled back‑office service designed to address long‑standing structural challenges in the chambers market, we can reveal. The Group has separated out its operational platform as a standalone proposition, allowing chambers to hand over functions ranging from technology and workflows to administration and diary management, while retaining their independence and brand.
Barristers’ chambers are collectives of self-employed individuals, not businesses, which has been a limiting factor when it comes to investing in new technology and platforms. This is what drove The Barrister Group’s founder Stephen Ward in 2001 to found the company, which is a tech‑enabled umbrella for brands including Barrister Group Chambers, mediation and arbitration business TBG ADR, barrister subscription business (for barristers who want extra work) MyBarrister, and public access business Barrister Connect. All of those brands already run on a shared operational platform that combines technology, workflows and a central team and now is a brand in its own right.
At the heart of the platform – now branded VENTRiQ – is a technology layer designed to match work to the most appropriate available barrister, supported by workflows, systems and operational teams, that also adapts as barristers’ experience and preferences change over time.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, The Barrister Group’s chief executive officer Emily Foges (pictured above) said: “What we’re doing now is going to market with that proposition as our core proposition, which is we will do that back-office, technology-enabled work for chambers. It’s going to be much more efficient and has economies of scale, because we’re handling 2000 different cases a month and 3000 different organisations are instructing us every year through the platform. So, there’s scale and there’s efficiency.”
She added: “Chambers are about reputation and relationships but increasingly they have to think about cybersecurity and data protection. They have to have invoicing systems. They have to have a call centre, effectively. It’s too much for one organisation of that size, especially one that doesn’t have a P&L.”
A key part of the proposition is a clear boundary between operational support and chambers’ identity. Foges was explicit that the Group is not seeking to interfere with chambers’ positioning or reputation in the market.
Foges said: “We can enable chambers to really focus on their core business, which is sending clerks out to do business development and marketing and meeting people and building reputation and relationships, and then hand the back-office work to us.”
It will be interesting to see whether clerks will be comfortable handing over diarisation, which has traditionally been a key part of their role and connects them to clients. Foges says: “Clerks should be doing what they do best, which is going out in the market. We’re allowing them to focus on all of their efforts on reputation and relationship building and we’ll take aways the invoicing and admin.”
The Barristers Group has an API with the UK Courts system that enables them to sync barristers’ diaries. Foges said: “The frequency with which things drop out of the diary now is escalating dramatically. You imagine the work it takes for the clerk checking that and realising it’s changed and finding somebody else to fill that gap and all the rest of it. We can just take all of that away.”
VENTRiQ will offer four different levels of service, from a complete end-to-end service for chambers that don’t have any clerks or infrastructure, down to debt collection, including aged debt, for established chambers.
VENTRiQ will have a stand at The Barrister Group’s spring conference on 12 March, and you can sign up to attend and find out more here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-barrister-groups-2026-spring-conference-the-network-effect-tickets-1980707559630
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