Empathetic and energetic barrister who fought against cuts in legal aid and started a world-class advocacy course from his Pimlico basement dies aged 68
Tim Dutton KC hailed from the commercial, “fat cat” end of the barristers’ profession but his commitment to public service and keen sense of social justice made him a natural leader for the entire Bar and he became one of its foremost and most influential figures.
Tall, charming and charismatic, Dutton — the leading barrister of his generation in professional regulation and discipline — did much in his time as Bar chairman in 2007 to fight the corner for legal aid and to puncture the image of lawyers getting rich on the public purse. He highlighted that a typical junior barrister worked a 70-hour week and earned £12,000 a year, barely the minimum wage.
He was deeply concerned about the implications for the criminal justice system if the Bar failed to attract the best graduates, and fought hard, with some success, to make the case to the government to reverse the relentless cuts to the legal aid budget. At the time, he told The Times how angry mentions of barristers earning £1 million a year made him. “We have 4,000 barristers doing publicly funded work and 30 per cent of those under three years’ qualified are earning less than £10,000 a year,” he said.
It was not just a fight for his profession. Lawyers in a democracy, he argued, upheld the rule of law. If the profession were weakened, people might ask: who cares? He responded: “The voiceless, the prosecution in rape cases, the victim of serious crime, the family fighting to keep their children.”
The concern had driven him to set up what became a world-class advocacy course. When Dutton started out at the Bar in the 1970s, barristers barely had any formal advocacy training. They almost always learnt on the job and the prevailing view was that advocates were born, not made. Dutton later recalled: “You would do a performance of advocacy and the teacher would say, ‘Learn to ask closed questions in cross-examination and, by the way, take your hands out of your pockets’. Or, ‘You got a bit lost there — and maybe it would be better if you did it chronologically’.” He added: “You may have the innate skills, but you’ve got to hone them.”
In 1994, in the basement of his house in Pimlico and with the backing of the leader of the South Eastern circuit, David Penry-Davey QC, Dutton hatched the idea of a course to do just this. Dutton had taught advocacy to trial lawyers in the United States and thought their methods could be brought to Britain.
The week-long residential Advanced International Advocacy Course began that year at Keble College, Oxford, where Dutton had read jurisprudence, and became the world’s leading course for practising advocates, as well as Dutton’s own chief legacy. He directed the course from 1994 to 2004 and masterminded every aspect. Attended by many thousands of barristers and future judges, it shaped the profession’s approach to advocacy training over the next 20 years.
Timothy James Dutton was born in 1957 to Derek Dutton, a school headmaster, and Joan (née Parsons), a nurse. They moved from Essex to North Yorkshire when he was five years old. His father passed on a keen sense of humour and an appreciation of English language and literature. Dutton also developed a love of music, which led to his founding the Bar Choral Society in 2014. He was one of its lead baritone voices, and the composer and conductor John Rutter was, at his invitation, its president.
As a boy he was a chorister at the Durham Cathedral school, funded by music and academic scholarships, and became an accomplished French horn player. The preparation needed to ensure a flawless solo performance, he would say, was the ideal schooling for the Bar.
When he was 17 and preparing for A-levels he suffered the first of two major health setbacks that were to shape his approach to life. He was boarding at Repton school in Derbyshire, losing weight and constantly exhausted. Although more than 6ft tall his weight had fallen to five and a half stone. A doctor diagnosed type 1 diabetes and he was in hospital for a month. It made him focused and disciplined. “You can’t go out boozing every night,” he told The Advocacy Podcast in 2023. “It made me very determined to live every day fully. It focused my attention on the brevity of life, the need to feel every day as much as possible and achieve as much as you can. I don’t mean an overweening ambition for huge sums of money, but things that are worthwhile.”
He won a place at Keble in 1975 to read law and was called to the Bar (Middle Temple) in 1979. Even before studying at Oxford he had visited the Old Bailey with a friend and thought, “I’d like to do this”. He began with a mixed practice of commercial and civil work and by the mid-1980s was making frequent appearances acting for the National Coal Board in unfair dismissal claims brought by sacked miners. His outstanding memory of that time was the sight of striking miners combing the beach at Seaham for coal washed up by the sea.
In 1983 he met Sappho Dias, who had fled with her family from persecution by the Burmese junta. As a pupil barrister at Farrar’s Building, where Dutton started out, she had been assigned the task of going to Bow Street magistrates’ court to give him his wig, which he had left behind. She told him, “I am in chambers to do pupilage, not wait on you”. They married in 1987 and had a daughter, Pia, also a barrister. His wife, daughter and a sister and brother survive him.
In part as a result of their marriage, Dutton became keenly aware of discrimination within the profession, noting in 2008 that 20 years earlier, “one or two judges might affect not to ‘hear’ my wife in court … Things have improved hugely but we must keep plugging away.” Her family’s experiences prompted both of them to set up the Burma Justice Committee to campaign to re-establish the rule of law in Myanmar.
Dutton took silk in 1998 and his work developed into professional regulation and discipline. Richard Coleman KC, a fellow member of chambers, said: “It was an area of practice he was to dominate for 25 years. He became the barrister of choice for the Law Society and other regulators. The work had a public interest and policy dimension that appealed to Tim’s sense of public service.”
Dutton became a bencher in 2003, was leader of the South Eastern circuit from 2004 to 2006, head of chambers at Fountain Court from 2008 to 2013 and chairman of the Association of Regulatory and Disciplinary Lawyers from 2009 to 2015. He was appointed a recorder, sitting from 2000 to 2017, and served as a deputy High Court judge.
He acted for the Financial Reporting Council in its case against Deloitte over audits of Autonomy, resulting in a £15 million fine. In 2009 he was appointed to investigate a £20 million account used by Sport England, finding significant governance failures. He also led the appeal in 2015 by Impact Funding Solutions against the insurer AIG Europe over professional indemnity coverage. The ruling, upheld by the Supreme Court, confirmed that insurers must cover disbursement loans to solicitors who act negligently.
Among his rare defeats was one in the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal, involving solicitors from the law firm Leigh Day. They had acted for Iraqis alleging torture and killings by the British army and were accused of serious professional failings in handling the case. The tribunal cleared the solicitors, finding they had acted in good faith.
In 2014, soon after founding the Bar Choral Society, Dutton received a diagnosis of motor neurone disease. He was given three years to live but continued to practise — including appearing in trials and on four occasions in the Supreme Court — and retired only in January this year. In 2015 he was appointed CBE for his services to the UK legal system.
To the end, he tackled his illness with humour. He noted that two other benchers of Middle Temple had been afflicted by the disease. “Was it the cabbage?” Dutton asked. Stuart Ritchie KC, also of Fountain Court Chambers, said: “He had an almost [Stephen] Hawking-like quality that was so courageous and so defiant. He wanted to see it off.”
In November, Dutton told friends he was retiring after losing the use of his limbs and hands. “As an advocate he had huge empathy and energy,” Ritchie added. “He was never judgmental. And, unlike many barristers who are good problem-solvers but don’t get things done, he got things done through a combination of persistence and charm.”
That, together with extraordinary willpower and the support of his wife and daughter, enabled him to continue to work. This he did from his home in Cupar, Fife, where he had taken huge pride in designing the garden. He loved modern architecture and enjoyed, over the years, moving from one property design project to the next. He also enjoyed sailing (including in international competitions), with his wife and daughter as crew, played tennis well and spoke fluent French.
He said in 2021: “Even if you’re in a state of total paralysis, there will still be birdsong. There will still be wine that can be drunk … there’s still music. There will still be books. There’s still room for enjoyment.”
Tim Dutton CBE KC, barrister and former chairman of the Bar, was born on February 25, 1957. He died of motor neurone disease on June 4, 2025, aged 68