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Presiley Baxendale QC, a formidable advocate, former head of Blackstone Chambers and latterly one of the UK’s leading mediators, is set to retire at the end of March 2008. Her reasons for doing so, aged 57, remain private.
She declined to be interviewed by The Mediator, but Julia Hornor, practice manager at Blackstone Chambers, said she will ‘pursue interests outside the law.’
As an advocate, Baxendale will perhaps best be remembered for her role as counsel to Lord Justice Scott's inquiry into the arms-to-Iraq affair. The inquiry was set up in 1992 when three executives from Matrix Churchill, an exporter of machine tools, were charged with deceiving the government as to the fact that the machines could be used in the manufacture of munitions in Iraq.
At the inquiry, which the BBC labeled a ‘spectacular exposé of the inner workings of Whitehall’, Baxendale cross-examined witnesses including then Prime Minister John Major, his predecessor Margaret Thatcher, and other ministers including Michael Heseltine, Kenneth Clarke, Lord Howe, Douglas Hurd and Alan Clark.
It was under cross-examination that Alan Clark MP famously admitted that notes of one DTI meeting were ‘economical with the actualité’ and that he knew full well the machine tools could be used to manufacture munitions.
Steeped in a background of high-profile adversarial disputes, Baxendale’s move into mediation was widely seen as an endorsement of the process. Commenting on her departure, former editor of The Legal 500, Richard Freeland, said, ‘Presiley Baxendale QC was a pioneer of mediation at the English Bar; she was the first top-level advocate to commit 100% of her working life to this method of dispute resolution, which at the time was a courageous decision. She is immensely respected at the Bar and she has done the world of ADR a great service.’
In an interview with this correspondent around the time she switched from advocacy to mediation, Baxendale said she had enjoyed being an advocate enormously but found mediation ‘fun.’ Mediation suited Baxendale who described herself as ‘utterly non-judgmental.’ She continued, ‘I’m happy to advise people, I have huge views about things, but I don’t like making judgments on people. I was useless when I was an assistant to the Court,’ she conceded. ‘I only sat for two weeks and each week I lost half a stone. I’m too thin to be a judge.’
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