Silk, the bench, and stopping

Taking silk is a day of considerable ceremony. Full-bottomed wig, the swearing-in, photographs on the steps, a career's worth of work publicly acknowledged in an afternoon.

It is also one of the least financially predictable moments in a practice. The junior work steps back before the silk work fully arrives, the market takes a while to reposition you, and rates move on a different timetable from reputation. Most new silks are told to expect a lean spell. Rather fewer arrange their reserves around it in advance, which is a shame, because it is one of the few income shocks in professional life that comes with several months' notice.

The bench presents the opposite problem, and a larger one. A judicial salary is a known, stable, index-linked figure, and for a successful commercial silk it is very often a substantial pay cut, accepted deliberately. What partly compensates is the judicial pension, which is generous by any modern standard and structurally unlike anything available in private practice. It also brings its own complications, and the interaction between judicial pension accrual and the annual allowance has caused enough difficulty over the past decade to become a recurring feature of judicial recruitment discussions.

Then there is stopping, which the Bar does less definitively than most professions. There is no retirement age, no scheme pension age forcing the question, and a great many practitioners who simply do less rather than none. That flexibility is genuinely valuable. It also means the decision never presents itself as a decision, and decumulation planning that assumes a single cliff-edge date will not describe the situation.

The common thread is that all three moments change the shape of income rather than simply its size, and shape is the harder thing to plan around.