LawCareersNetLIVE London keynote speech 2019

This inspiring speech was the keynote address at LawCareersNetLIVE London 2019.

People jostling for jobs, burnishing their CVs, competing against those around them… Anyway, enough of what is happening amongst candidates looking for jobs at the other end of Westminster Bridge. In contrast, I am delighted to be speaking to what is plainly a professional, rational and dynamic group of prospective lawyers before me today.

For those who might have missed the introduction, I head the banking and financial markets disputes team at RPC, and I am also the firm's training principal.

When I was asked to deliver this keynote speech today, I paused before saying yes because it will not surprise you to hear that it has been 25 years since I was sitting in your seat. Naturally, I thought – why would you want to hear from me? What insight might I have which is relevant to you?

I hope that the answer lies in the fact that during my 25 years in law, I have been a trainee supervisor for about 20 of those years, involved in graduate recruitment for about 15 years and training principal at RPC for the last five years. In that time, I have thought a lot about the careers landscape and the challenges on both sides of the fence – for graduates and for the firms.

What I wanted to share with you today were five or so key messages which I have gleaned over my career and which might be helpful to you in the early stages of your legal careers. I thought I would do that in the context of the career I have experienced.

In many respects, my career has been traditional. I went to Durham University and studied history and economics. When I was there, I was not sure what I wanted to do. I thought about banking and therein lies the first – but not the last – narrow escape of my career. 

Then law caught my eye. Aside from the fact it was something my parents might have considered at the time to be a proper job, it attracted me because it seemed to combine an intellectual base (ie, the law) with a good dose of commercial life (ie, the clients).

I made a number of applications. I was successful at one firm but at the interview the trainee got lost whilst showing me around this large building (and it was a small firm by today's standards), so that put me off. Eventually I settled at a firm called Wilde Sapte, which later merged with Denton Hall to become what is today Dentons.

Breaking down the ‘wall of information’

And that is the first point to make. I hesitate to say this was the pre-internet age, but the resources at my disposal to make a career-related decision were the university careers room and the occasional law fair. In one sense, ignorance was bliss. But the reality was that it was incredibly difficult to find information beyond glossy brochures unless you knew someone in the profession – which I did not. 

Contrast that with today, where every firm has a website and there is no end of online comparison resources, copious amounts of data and an endless Twitter stream of news from large and small firms alike, extolling the virtues of a career at their law firm.

If I may, I would suggest that one of your challenges is to get behind that wall of information. If you are looking at City firms, national firms or significant regional firms, all will tell you, for example, that they do corporate work, litigation work and real estate. And they will be right about that. But what are the proportions? 

Is it primarily a litigation firm which has a modest corporate team servicing a specific sector such as tech or pharmaceuticals, supported by real estate? Or is it a corporate powerhouse doing top flight M&A work where the litigation function is there only to service disputes generated by the corporate clients? Or more likely is it somewhere in between.

Understanding the composition of a firm and the real nature of the work is really important, because it will allow you to make more informed decisions and it will allow you to give more convincing explanations as to why you are motivated towards a particular firm when interviewed.

So, ask about the numbers and percentages of lawyers doing the different types of work. Ask about the main sectors that the firms focuses on. Try to get below the surface with your questions.

After two years at the College of Law in York, I joined Wilde Sapte. My first seat was banking litigation. Not just litigation, but banking litigation. If anyone had asked me at law college what seat I would have liked to do (and they didn't), I might have said corporate, possibly real estate. Litigation would not have been anywhere on my radar. In fact, to be honest, I had actually failed a criminal litigation written paper on evidence at the first attempt. Not the hallmark of a budding litigator.

So, there I was in September 1994, with 40 banking litigation files in front of me and no Google or Siri to help me. But, to my own surprise, I loved it.

Keep an open mind

And that leads me to lesson number two. Keep an open mind at every stage of your career but particularly in your training contract. Don't go into your career with any preconceptions about a particular type of work.

Consider seats you know nothing about. Consider seats which are unfashionable. Let's face it, everyone wants the media seat. The experience of practising law in a particular discipline can be vastly different to studying it in an academic context.

This is the beauty of a training contract – embrace it. Four seats, four experiences to allow you to make an informed choice about your own career.

Now stick with me – it's October 1994. Four weeks in I am ‘offered’ a secondment to bank of Scotland. Great. A client secondment. “This career thing is going really well,” I think to myself.

But it means moving to Edinburgh – not so great. A fantastic city, but I had just moved from Yorkshire to London. So, perhaps with more bravery or naivety than I realised at the time, I said no thanks.

Client secondments

And that brings me to lesson number three: client secondments. 

At some point as a junior lawyer you may well be offered a secondment to a client. It may be for a few weeks or six months, it might be part-time or full-time. They come in all shapes and sizes. 

However, assuming it does not involve you moving several hundred miles, I would strongly encourage you to take the opportunity. Even if it is not a sector you want to work in, or it is not doing the type of work you want to do long term, seeing the inside of a client, seeing how the in-house legal team interacts with the business it serves, and seeing what law firms get right and wrong when dealing with their clients will be a fascinating experience. 

It is one that will enhance your career no end. It will allow you to get the insight which others do not have.

So, having survived for two years, I qualified at Wilde Sapte in 1996 as a banking litigator. In those days it was private practice or, well, private practice. There were some in-house roles but not many of them and not in any great numbers at a junior level.

Strategic thinking

That brings me to lesson number four: think strategically. When you are considering career options, particularly on qualification but also more generally as a junior lawyer, there are two factors that should loom large. 

First, what do you enjoy? You will only get the best from yourself if you really enjoy the type of work you choose for your career. Clients can be demanding and the hours can be long. 

As you will now know, the personal investment you have to make to a career in law has to be significant if it is going to be successful. If you are waking up every morning as a lawyer bored with what the day holds, then you are likely to be on the wrong track. 

Second, slightly more controversially, there may be no point trying to join a team which is not able to grow because it is fully formed, and the market will not allow it to grow or develop. 

So ask yourself: which are the growing teams in my firm or the firm I want to join? Which direction is the firm going in? Into which team is the firm's investment going?

Sometimes points one and two overlap – a growing team in an area you would really enjoy practising in. Sometimes they do not. I am not saying which way you should jump in those circumstances – that is an entirely personal choice and only you can make it – but do make an informed choice.

Options beyond prive practice

Which bring me to lesson five. I still hear from some corners of the legal community that Millennials, Generation X, Generation Y (delete as appropriate) show no loyalty to law firms any more and that three years after qualification, lawyers are moving on and are not prepared to put in the hard graft to get to partner.

Putting aside the question of whether you as a generation want to get to partnership, I genuinely do not think it is you as a body of junior lawyers that has changed.

The fact you are here today finding out about career options and making informed choices is no different to every other group of prospective lawyers that has gone before you.

What has changed is the legal sector around you. The breadth of opportunities which now exist from private practice, to the in-house legal community, to the regulators – all offering excellent and varied training to junior lawyers making you marketable and knowledgeable in a way which, frankly, I was not.

To my mind, no one should be critical of junior lawyers who seek out the variety of experiences which are being offered to them in order to enhance their own careers in which they have had to invest so much. I would therefore encourage you to embrace that broad palette of opportunities when making your decisions.

I am heavily involved in recruitment of associates and lateral partners into the litigation team at my firm. I would say that less than 50% of the CVs that I see today at interview stage are from candidates who have been associates at only one or perhaps two, firms.

A good number have done extensive client secondments. A number will have spent time in-house at corporates or regulators or government bodies. A number will have had career breaks to pursue academic interests. And, of course, many are coming back from family-related career breaks.

And all of this is fantastic. It reflects the change which we have seen in the legal sector over many years and which change is continuing at pace – one such example being the introduction of solicitor apprenticeships. 

The breadth of opportunities which exist in the legal sector in its totality for junior lawyers has never been wider.

And I take this moment to mention work-life balance as its importance has never been higher.

It is absolutely true to say that different organisations in the private sector have different expectations in terms of hours and as a result pay very different amounts. There is a very wide spectrum.

It is an entirely personal decision as to where on that spectrum you want to pitch yourself.

For me, like any other lawyer in the City, I work long hours and balancing that with a family life is a constant challenge which puts demands on those around me far more than it puts demands on me.

But I have always been acutely conscious of maintaining some degree of balance, particularly around weekends. Some organisations are getting much better at recognising the need for balance and helping lawyers achieve that. Again, it is something for you to explore and factor in to your own thinking about the type of organisation you want to work in.

Change on many fronts

The evolution of the legal sector, and the way that is driving change through the law firms which make up a significant part of that legal sector, has more momentum that at any time in my career.

The inclusion and diversity agenda has been driving real change in how we recruit our lawyers, how that talent is promoted within the firms and how we work with others to broaden access to the legal profession. Yes, it has partly been driven by clients but I have no doubt that the profession has got the message, is acting upon it and we have reached tipping point.

So change is happening on many fronts. It is happening to career structures, it is impacting how clients obtain their legal services, it is shaping the firms in the market – from longstanding traditional firms to those who provide lawyers on demand - and it is driving how we do things.

And, in the final narrative on my own past, that is where my career collided head on with technological change.

I have now fast forwarded 20 years to 2016. I am a partner leading a case where I am representing a fund, an investor, in a company where there were allegations of misconduct against the former directors. Our client was called Pyrrho Investments – it might be ringing bells for some of you.

We reached disclosure in the proceedings and with the volume of documents we faced for review, we decided that the use of predictive coding was the way to manage the costs of disclosure. But, although predictive coding has been used before, remarkably no court in England had actually sanctioned its use.  

We did not want to spend money on predictive coding only to be forced to re-do the disclosure exercise if the court was not content with the process. So, we were fortunate to come before a master in the court who was a strong supporter of technology. He gave us the first public judgment of the English court approving the use of predictive coding.

The decision went viral. The coverage in the legal and technology press was immense. The associate I worked with spoke at conferences in Chicago, Luxembourg and Dublin.

For my part, my career's work seems to boil down to a small footnote in the White Book (volume 1, rule 3.6.5 at page 999 if anyone is interested).

So my sixth and final lesson today is that it is an incredibly exciting time to be in the legal profession and I would encourage you all to embrace the change that is going on, think about all the options before you (which no longer begin and end with a traditional career trajectory in private practice) and shape a career which suits you and your life choices.

Simon Hart is a partner in the commercial disputes practice of RPC’s London office and head of the financial disputes team.