Commercial litigation involves the resolution of disputes arising in the corporate and commercial sectors, such as asset and venture capital projects, banking transactions, civil fraud, corporate governance, EU/competition, financial services regulation, mergers and acquisitions, share capital reorganisations and professional negligence.

The 1999 Woolf reforms aimed to create a quicker and less expensive system that encourages the early settlement of disputes through mechanisms such as alternative dispute resolution. There is disagreement as to their effectiveness, but fewer cases do now reach the courts.

Edward Bridge is an associate in the dispute resolution group at Covington & Burling LLP, an international firm with a stellar global reputation for litigation. Edward read law at Queen Mary, University of London before heading to Montreal to undertake a postgraduate law degree at McGill University. He feels that this experience was extremely valuable to him as a young lawyer: "I chose McGill because it has a unique law faculty that teaches both civil law and common law courses, as both apply within Quebec. McGill is also one of the leading universities for the study of international comparative law, so this was a great opportunity."

After qualifying with a UK firm, Edward felt that Covington & Burling offered him a better platform to achieve his career goals. "US firms tend to give you more responsibility at a younger age. I’ve got friends of my age at UK firms whose job is simply to supervise the litigation bundle preparation by trainees and paralegals. By choosing Covington & Burling, I have gained a much broader range of skills and experience."

His practice now covers the full spectrum of commercial disputes, incorporating both litigation and arbitration. "I would describe my area of expertise as straight commercial disputes - disputes between parties that arise out of a contract. You will find with many commercial litigators that there is a lot of flexibility in terms of what they do. This is where commercial litigation differs from, say, banking litigation, where you need to have specific industry knowledge and know the commercial practices of banks inside out."

As a commercial litigator, there is no such thing as a typical day. Edward illustrates this with a recent case: "I arrived at the office at 8:30am. At 9:30am we took a call from a client who owned a large European company. He was being sued personally for hundreds of millions over allegations that he procured various companies to breach their contracts. We headed straight to Heathrow to meet his personal lawyers, who had just flown in. That day was spent almost entirely in meeting rooms near the airport trying to establish the background of the case. We’ve now been working on that for the last three weeks."

It is the unpredictable nature of the work that makes the job so exciting, explains Edward: "The point is, you never really know what is going to land on your desk. The whole thing about litigation is that it's not like a business deal: it suddenly seems to come out of nowhere when a dispute kicks off. Because it doesn’t tend to be repeat business, you are constantly meeting interesting new people, from different businesses and from different walks of life."

As a top international litigation firm, Covington & Burling attracts a lot of clients involved in very serious, bet-the-company disputes, particularly those with international or very public elements that require a lot of PR management. The firm also acts in litigation and arbitration proceedings that arise from commercial or sovereign disputes, involving the expropriation by governments of commercial interests. Edward was recently on a team that successfully represented a major international client defending arbitration proceedings relating to the termination of a distribution agreement in the Far East. After a year of hard work, once all the witness statements and submissions had been prepared and the client had been guided through the arbitral process, a formal week-long hearing took place, with witnesses and representatives flying in from all around the globe. Upon hearing the evidence, the arbitrator decided in favour of the firm’s client, dismissing the claimant’s arguments.

It is the more routine elements of his job that Edward finds the most frustrating: "I think most lawyers hate recording and billing time. The idea of having to account for every hour of your day can be a real drag."

Edward is keen to point out that this area of the law is not for everybody and requires specific attributes: "To excel as a commercial litigator, you must have a keen sense of commerciality. You need to know what the client is looking for and learn to see the wood from the trees. Clients are not paying you to write essays on what the law means - they want you to make the problem go away and ideally avoid litigation altogether. This is achieved by getting to know how their business works. Simply taking an interest in business generally and the way the City works from early in your career can give you a surprising headstart."

Wannabe commercial litigators should, however, ask themselves some difficult questions before embarking on their career and try to gain as much experience as possible. Edward believes that a vacation scheme is the best place to start, as this gives a real flavour of the day-to-day activities of a solicitor.

He pinpoints two key considerations: "Litigation requires a genuine interest in the law - probably more so than other departments. It is important to ask yourself whether the law genuinely interests you. If not, then it probably isn’t going to work out. This is less of an issue if you are going into certain areas of corporate law because you tend to be more of a dealmaker than a blackletter lawyer. You also need to be able to cope well with pressure. If you are unflappable, then that is a good indication that you are well suited to this kind of work."

While commercial litigation may not be for everyone, it is clearly a career choice which can ultimately be extremely fulfilling. "It is a great privilege to have a job in which you have the opportunity to use your brain on a daily basis. I know people in other jobs, like banking for example, who dread going into work. I genuinely like and enjoy what I do. It's interesting, you have to think and it pushes you."