The Table Nobody Saw Coming: IWD

A Thought Around International Women's Day 2026

I could not help but wonder, what if the most powerful thing women in law could do for each other had absolutely nothing to do with the law?

Last week, I had drinks with my female friends.

Except, these were not just any friends. Sitting around that table with me were three of the most formidable women of colour I know. A King’s Counsel. A Crown Court Recorder and a President of an International Industrial Tribunal. Four women of colour in a profession that has spent decades telling women like us, quietly, persistently, and sometimes not so quietly, that we did not quite belong. Collectively, we have argued before courts in jurisdictions from the Caribbean to the City of London. Between us, we have navigated terrorism prosecutions, SFO investigations, election petitions, and the kind of cross-border financial crime that makes your head spin.

And not one single case came up. Not once.

Instead? Laughter, honesty, wisdom and the quiet, profound act of giving each other something that no brief, no judgment, and no Chambers directory could ever capture,  our real selves.

But what made the evening truly unforgettable it had nothing to do with the combined decades of courtroom wins, the silk appointments, or the Chambers rankings.

It was the honesty.

No cases discussed. No victories trumpeted. No performance of importance. Just the truth about our respective journey’s. We found ourselves apologising to each other, not for our own actions,  but for the behaviour of others in our profession that each of us had been forced to silently absorb and move on from;  “that should not have happened to you." 

What is “giving”? The honest, unguarded disclosure of trials and tribulations of being a woman of colour in a profession that did not always want you, of being a working mother and carer, juggling impossible things, of carrying the weight of international cases, whilst also going through signficant life changes. Giving that truth to each other, freely, across a table was immeasurable.

Melanie Simpson KC (25 Bedford Row): Windrush heritage, left school at 16, navigated unfunded pupillage as a single mother, and became one of thirty women appointed to silk in 2020. She is now a role model for a generation of young Black women at the Bar. I have known Melanie since we were both junior lawyers. All I wanted back then was to be her friend. I am so glad she accepted my friendship. 

Adina Ezekiel (Squire Patton Boggs): my darling university friend, which still gives me a little thrill to say. Twenty-plus years at the Bar, now in white-collar crime litigation and the kind of international investigations that make your eyes water, sitting part-time as a Crown Court Recorder. The directories deem her "simply excellent." I deem her a force of nature. Both quite frankly are an understatement.

Her Hon. Indira Demeritte-Francis M.B, President of the Industrial Tribunal for the Commonwealth of The Bahamas: Presiding over some of the most complex employment and industrial matters in the Commonwealth of The Bahamas, bringing decades of legal expertise and the quiet authority of someone who has absolutely nothing left to prove.

And underneath all those titles? The same funny, sharp, gloriously real women they have always been. Just with considerably more receipts.

Here is something nobody tells you when you start out in this profession: the career is long, and life, with its demands and beautiful detours, means that even the people who matter most can drift to the edges. Not through any failing of love, but because we are all, at some point, just trying to keep all the balls in the air at once.

We had not all been in the same room for years. Our individual journeys, the cases, the moves, the children, the reinventions had each of us running our own extraordinary race. And finally, for that one evening, we stopped running. 

Cherish your true friends in this profession. The ones who knew you before the titles. The ones who show up through every stage, the climb, the stumble, the transformation, and the quiet triumphant moment when you finally realise you became exactly who you were supposed to be. Those friendships are not a luxury. They are a lifeline.

I travelled home that night differently from how I arrived. Motivated in a way no conference keynote has ever managed and uplifted by women who have walked harder roads than most and come out the other side as champions. And I learnt from each one of them, about resilience, grace under fire, and what it looks like to hold your ground in rooms not built for you without losing an ounce of who you are.

That is what women give each other when we finally permit ourselves to just be. 

So this IWD, give something real. Your time, your truth, your visibility, because when women give like that, we multiply everything.

And anyone who still thinks you cannot be brilliant and stylish while practising law, well, they simply have not met women like us yet.

Author Narita Bahra KC – Garrick Law & 33 Chancery Lane Chambers has been shortlisted as a finalist for the Legal Diversity and Inclusion Award, LexisNexis 2026.

https://www.naritabahra.com/