Making headlines today more than ever, the energy and natural resources sector is also an important part of the legal landscape. Among other things, it covers oil and gas projects, pipelines, refineries, liquefied natural gas, nuclear power and renewables. Emerging energy initiatives such as biofuels and carbon capture and storage also feature. The key legal issues centre on trading and projects, and may be either domestic or international in scope.

Ben Holland specialises in energy litigation and is a partner at CMS Cameron McKenna, one of the top 15 law firms in the United Kingdom. Ben followed a relatively traditional route to his current position, studying law at Lady Margaret Hall College, Oxford before completing his LPC at the Oxford Institute of Legal Practice (OXILP). He then did his training contract at another major City player, Herbert Smith LLP.

Although Ben‘s career path was a welltrodden one in his day, he explains that things are a little different now for candidates seeking positions at the larger firms. "It was common in those days to go from college to somewhere like OXILP," he says. "But now firms like CMS Cameron McKenna have a special arrangement with schools such as BPP and require graduates to join tailored courses. They are basically specialist versions of the LPC that really focus on major corporate City transactions, so that people are able to join with a bit of a head start."

That said, Ben readily admits that the training contract is quite a dramatic change from the safe, sheltered world of academia, and can be somewhat overwhelming. "The training contract was a bit of a shock. It definitely was. I remember my very first seat - I really had a great deal of trouble adapting. It all suddenly becomes very real. It's one thing learning the law, which I thought was incredibly interesting, but it's very different when you are dealing with real money and real people and real deadlines, and the real prospect of getting things wrong. But it's good to stretch yourself and I'm glad I stuck with it. I enjoyed my second seat more, and then I did two seats on the trot in litigation and arbitration and really enjoyed my second year of training much more than I did my first. I think the best thing to do is to just push through each of the four six-month seats and do the very best you can. If there's one you don't get on with, there are still three more."

It was during his training contract that Ben first encountered energy law and it made a lasting impression. "When I was doing my training, I got involved in a very large, very significant energy dispute. There were vast amounts at stake, some very interesting legal issues and a large number of different oil companies were involved. The case ended up going to the House of Lords, which for any litigation lawyer is really the best place to be. So my first-ever case as a qualified lawyer was in the House of Lords. It was a good way in and I've loved it since then. It was a baptism by fire in some ways, but I relished the challenge and it was so genuinely exciting that I still think it was the most enjoyable case I've ever done."

That case gave Ben a taste of the myriad elements that make energy such an appealing sector: "I think it is a genuinely fascinating area," he explains. "It's extremely international and it's extremely political, for obvious reasons, with various governments involved. Much of the work that we do here is extremely high value and you often deal with extremely long-term contracts, so if anything goes wrong under these contracts you end up with a very significant problem - just because of the cumulative year-on-year problem you have if someone fails to do what they have promised to do. So it's political, international and high value. It's also an area that is never likely to die down: even though we may vary the types of energy that we use, we are always going to need energy in some form or other. So it's completely recessionproof. It's always going to be an enormous factor in the life of any industrialised country and I can't think of any area of the law that I'd be more interested in practising in."

Unsurprisingly, with a high level of interest comes a high level of involvement and energy lawyers need to get used to working in highpowered, high-pressure environments: "A typical day will normally involve a mix of international conference calls, face-to-face meetings, researching opinions, preparing documents and talking though ideas with the team of eight people I have working with me. There's also a fair bit of international travel - I travel abroad every couple of weeks, to see clients or attend conferences."

Life for a trainee at CMS Cameron McKenna is obviously not quite as stressful as it can be for the partners, but you should still expect to kept busy and there will definitely be client contact. "There is a real drive at getting people close to clients. My view is that the more time people spend getting close to the way clients work and where their pressures are, the better lawyers they are and the better they are at dealing with clients' issues. The other thing we do at CMS Cameron McKenna is to make sure that as many as possible of our junior lawyers, and even senior lawyers, spend time either abroad at our foreign offices or with clients in the sector they are working in."

While over time experience becomes invaluable, excelling as an energy lawyer requires several basic strengths from the start, believes Ben. "Energy contracts can be intensely complicated, very long and extremely hard to understand, often with mathematical formulae and price formulas, so the most important skill set is the patience to read these things and try to understand them.

After a few years doing them, they become more straightforward. The other thing is that oil companies can spend $50 million drilling a hole in the ground hoping there's going to be oil or gas at the bottom, but with the real risk it will be dry. So I think by nature they are risk takers and that can keep you on your toes. They will take things all the way to trial and you have to be able to keep up with them and think commercially about what they are trying to achieve, and have to have the stamina to fight and never give up."