Simone Start

Overview

Simone Start joined The City Law School in 2007. Since September 2020 she has been Director of the Bar Vocational Studies suite of programmes. She teaches Advocacy, Criminal Litigation, Evidence, Ethics and Conference Skills on the Bar Vocational Studies programme and is a supervisor on the LLM programme. Simone has been an assessor for the Crown Prosecution Service CPD training in higher rights of audience.

Since 2016, Simone has been part of an award winning initiative, ‘Advocacy with Impact’ with the aim of intensifying the skill-set of the next generation of public interest (PI) lawyers in South Africa. With other colleagues from City, she works with a leading South African PI law firm, Socio-Economic Rights Institute (SERI) in Johannesburg. The project offers free intensive advocacy training to young South African attorneys carrying out critical social justice work and therefore improves the quality of legal services available to those they represent from poor and vulnerable communities. The City team works alongside leading members of the South African bar and judiciary.

Simone was called to the Bar in 1994. Her practise at the Bar has included criminal prosecution and defence work in multi-handed cases, involving high-level public interest immunity and major surveillance operations. She has considerable experience of cases involving all aspects of violence, such as GBH, robbery, false imprisonment and sexual offences involving children and adults as well as third party disclosure hearings on behalf of local authorities. Simone is a door tenant at 2 Dr Johnson's Buildings.

Before joining The City Law School, Simone worked at the Criminal Appeal Office. She prepared cases for consideration by the Single Judge and the Full Court. As a result of her work she was invited to act as a judicial mentor ("judge's friend") to a newly appointed High Court Judge and acted as a supervisor to the sentencing group on appeals.

After graduating, Simone worked for two years as a lecturer at Nantes University in France. She wrote and delivered courses on undergraduate Comparative Law and postgraduate American Agricultural Law.

During a year studying at Parma University in Italy, Simone studied Medical-Legal Law and Public International Law and wrote a dissertation on International Adoption Law.