Mary Prior KC

Mary is an exceptional advocate. She is formidable, hard-working and very down-to-earth. She is tactically very astute and is especially good with vulnerable witnesses.’ Legal 500

‘Mary is one of the best silks around. She is a fantastic advocate – jurors love her. She breaks complex concepts down very easily and enables a jury to follow her arguments with ease. Her client care is also brilliant.’ Legal 500

‘Mary is a strong advocate in front of a jury or in submissions to a judge. From the early outset, she has a clear direction for her cases. All of her work is very well prepared.’ Legal 500

“Mary is an enormously experienced advocate with formidable advocacy skills – she is adept at building a relationship with the jury and dealing with difficult and often vulnerable clients. She has a powerhouse reputation at the Bar” Legal 500

Mary is a jury advocate. She takes hugely complex facts and presents them in a clear and concise way so that juries can understand the evidence. She gains the trust of the most vulnerable witnesses and defendants and enables them to be heard. She is often instructed in difficult and challenging cases, sometimes described as hopeless cases. She has an extremely high success rate in her cases.

In the last three years she has dealt with many cases with national and international media interest. These have included dealing with horrific murders of children which have involved sadistic torture and brutality. She defended one of the defendants in the Court of Appeal’s analysis on whole life murder cases. R v Stewart, Couzens, Tustin, Hughes and Monaghan. She has also received a Chief Crown Prosecutor’s Commendation for her work on the murder of Finley Boden.

Mary has special expertise in questioning children, those with mental and physical health difficulties. She enabled a child with cerebral palsy to give evidence and to be heard. She has a forensic ability to evaluate and consider thousands of pages of bank statements, telephone messages and social media and to enable the jury to consider what matters. She exposes holes and gaps in evidence.

Mary has taken her experience in rape cases to deal with serious multi-complainant sexual offences.

Mary has a busy private practice defending allegations of rape for those whose career or livelihood would be more significantly impacted by a conviction. This has included Doctors, teachers, the clergy and businessmen.

Mary is a sought after lecturer for advocacy and trial strategy. She regularly lectures to Solicitors, to the police and to other agencies.