From office junior to district judge

District Judge Keith Etherington

A FORMER Oldham solicitor and past president of the Oldham Law Association has been appointed a district judge.

Keith Etherington (44), a former pupil of North Chadderton School, started as the office junior at Mellor and Jackson solicitors the day after his final O-level exam in 1987, when he was only 15.

At his swearing in ceremony in Birmingham, High Court Judge Mr Justice Hayden, gave the analogy of the 1970s Hovis advert with the boy pushing a bicycle up a steep cobbled street and said this was akin to Mr Etherington’s career, save that the cobbled street was Church Lane and the destination was a small Oldham law firm.

Mr Etherington studied part time to qualify first as a legal executive in 1996 and then as a solicitor in 2002 and was president of thes Oldham Law Association in 2006. He served as a council member of The Law Society of England and Wales representing all solicitors practising civil litigation before being appointed as a part-time judge in 2013. In the same year, he joined Manchester firm Slater and Gordon.

Mr Etherington taught law and legal practice to students in Oldham for many years.

Of the six new judges at the ceremony in Birmingham, Mr Etherington was the only solicitor, the others were all barristers and he is one of a handful of judges in the country that have neither A-levels or a degree.

Mr Etherington said: “I hope my appointment helps other lawyers in the regions see that it is possible regardless of background.”

The appointment will take District Judge Etherington to the county courts in Stoke-on-Trent and Telford, where he will sit as a specialist civil judge.