Colin Wynter QC, barrister, Devereux Chambers

I was born in Jamaica but when I was very young my parents separated and my mother took jobs at the UN in New York and subsequently UNESCO in Paris. My brother and sister and I joined my mother in Paris in 1967, one year before the student uprisings, which forced us to take refuge in London. I went on to read law at the LSE, where I obtained a first; this allowed me the luxury of funding to read for a masters in criminology at Cambridge. I then decided to go to Bar school, as much because I could not think of anything better to do as out of any burning desire to practise law.

Finding a chambers that would be supportive

I applied to Devereux for the very simple reason that it had a woman QC (Diana Cotton). The Bar was a very different place in the early 1980s and I reasoned that a chambers that had sufficiently supported a woman barrister to become a QC was most probably the type of chambers that might give a young black man such as me the chance to be taken on and thereafter to do well. I have never regretted the choice that I made.

Good days and bad days as a barrister

I have been practising here for over 20 years, initially in crime and general common law but for the past 15 years or so almost exclusively in the fields of insurance and reinsurance. There are days in court when everything that could go wrong seems to go wrong. Those are the worst of days. There are also days when everything goes right and where one has the answer (and more) to every question asked by the judge. Those, for me, are the best moments of the job.