Masters of the Bench

Guy retired from practice on 31 March, after 45 years in chambers at One Crown Office Row, but remains an Associate Member of those chambers.  He has been elected to sit as an excepted hereditary peer on the Conservative Benches as Lord Sandhurst. He took his seat on 7 July 2021.  He is chair of research for the Society of Conservative Lawyers.  Guy received a Harmsworth Entrance Exhibition and a Winston Churchill Pupillage Award.  He was called to the Bar in 1972 and took Silk in 1994.  He was appointed a Recorder of the Crown Court in 1993 and a Deputy High Court Judge in 2008. He chaired the Bar Council’s Remuneration Committee from 1998 to 1999, where he drafted the first Standard CFA Terms for use by Barristers. He was Chairman of the Bar’s Legal Services Committee (2000-2003). During that time he was a member of Sir Sydney Kentridge QC’s Committee, which wrote the Bar’s response to the OFT investigation into the Professions; he then chaired the working party which introduced Public Access for the Bar.  He was Chairman of the Bar in 2005.  He was a member of the Council of JUSTICE (2006-2018) and the Bar Council’s nominee on the Queen’s Counsel Complaints Committee (2006-2019).  In 2009/10 he chaired a Bar Council working group producing three papers on the viability of a Contingent Legal Aid Fund.  He appeared in many reported cases, in particular, in the fields of legal practice/negligence, funding of litigation and clinical negligence. From 2012, Guy led the team instructed by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office in the ultimately successful defence of some 40,000 claims brought in the Kenyan Emergency Group Litigation (Kimathi & others v FCO). After a trial lasting 232 days all the claims were dismissed by Stewart J on 21 November 2018.

He contributed to a number of practitioner text books.