I was one of those children who spent a lot of time arguing with parents and siblings over the dinner table. They must have thought I was a natural advocate, even if I didn’t. I fell into law, frankly; I studied history at university.
My grandfather was a senior judge in Scotland. His advice to me was ‘Don’t practise law in Scotland, it’s a small pool in which to be a lawyer.’ He was a really impressive guy. I thought about being a journalist or something different, but at the end of my degree I sort of slipped into law rather than making a focused decision.
I was very fortunate to study history at Cambridge. You do two years of broad subjects and then in your final year you do a ‘special subject.’ I studied the KGB and the CIA. It was 1992 and the USSR had just collapsed. I travelled to parts of Russia and the Crimea back then as a backpacker, and we had an ex-KGB spy give our lectures. That was a particularly fascinating thing to study.
Some dons at Cambridge would occasionally tap students on their shoulders. And then they get letters from an address somewhere near Whitehall, go to interviews and sign Official Secrets Act declarations, and so on…
I trained at Stephenson Harwood. There was a litigation sub-group within the firm, headed by a guy called Steven Lowe, and I did my seat with him. Steven was a very tough and versatile litigator, he got me involved in a load of interesting cases.
We acted for Heather Mills. She sued the Met Police after being hit by one of their motorcycles and was seriously injured. We did it pro bono. There I was as a trainee, sitting in an interview room with her taking witness statements. I just realised the range of things you can do as a litigator was huge.
I left Stephenson Harwood within about 18 months of qualifying and went to Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer. Relatively soon after arriving, I ended up working for Ian Taylor. I had dinner with him last night. He would never do an interview of this kind; he’s probably never had a photo taken for a publication! He’s just a phenomenal litigator. There must be 40 or 50 litigation partners in the City who learned at his feet and view him as the gold standard.
At Freshfields, one time I came back from a three-week holiday in Brazil. I walked into my office and found Chris Pugh, who was one of the senior disputes partners there, waiting for me. Slightly unnerving. He was the lead partner on a case that was going to trial about three weeks later. It was a case that had a big reputation in Freshfields as being an absolute monster. He instructed me that I would be flying to San Francisco the following day to take witness evidence from a group of people who worked for a steel plant. It was a dispute about an oil rig.
I got on a plane the next day, flew out to San Francisco, got a load of witness statements, then flew to Texas to get some expert reports. All of this had to be served before the start of the trial, which was three weeks away. We had to get a private jet chartered by the client to get between meetings at one point. I remember being a junior partner, thinking ‘this is pretty strange.’
Our client was this hard-bitten Texan oil man. He won at trial against BP/Amoco, the biggest company in Europe. It was a remarkable triumph. I made so many friendships on that case – for example Daniel Toledano QC at One Essex Court, who was a junior barrister at the time. The case gave me a good insight into what a monster piece of litigation looked like.
Every litigator will have that feeling when your witness walks into the box – your blood runs cold, and you wonder if it will all be OK. I remember one expert witness, Professor Keith Miller, an expert in fracture mechanics. He was an eccentric Yorkshireman with a big beard who the judge absolutely loved. I remember at one meeting, he pulled open his briefcase and he had a load of metal samples he wanted to show us that were wrapped up in his y-fronts. He was a totally charismatic guy. The first line in the judge’s report of his evidence was: ‘Professor Miller’s evidence was a tour de force.’
I loved my time at Freshfields but I was in my mid-30s, my son had just been born, and I was questioning what I wanted to do with the rest of my career. I started looking around for other things – there was a recruiter who was working at Travers Smith looking for someone in the market. I hadn’t heard of Travers – their branding back in the day was ‘the City’s best kept secret’ which isn’t particularly good branding if you think about it! I asked around, I spoke to people at Travers, then quickly realised I should have known more about this firm.
I came to Travers and I haven’t regretted it once. I made a speech when I became head of the disputes practice in 2018, saying that joining the firm was the second-best decision in my life, after getting down on one knee to my wife.
The firm definitely has a ‘don’t take yourself too seriously’ personality. Don’t ever think that what we do is so important that you should be self-important. There are partners in my team whose other halves do real jobs, like heart surgeons and people who work in schools in deprived areas. They are doing far more important jobs for far less pay.
Every litigator will have that feeling when your witness walks into the box – your blood runs cold, and you wonder if it will all be OK.
To be a litigator, you must be prepared for disappointment. Usually you lose the cases you know you’re going to lose and win the cases you expect to win. So, you’re typically braced for disappointment, but it doesn’t make it any easier. I met a litigator in New York once who said: ‘You’re not a litigator until you’ve lost a case worth over $100m.’
A few of us acted on a case against Deutsche Bank a few years ago. It wasn’t just one disappointment; it was a demoralising march towards what ended up being an unsatisfactory result. That was a tough loss to take – there were people who had put their heart and soul into it for two or three years.
When my colleagues who worked on the HP/Autonomy case came back in January with a positive judgment, there were tears in the eyes of most of them. That had been eight or nine years of their careers dedicated to that one vast undertaking. You need to be prepared for the great highs but also the great lows.
My dispute resolution style? I try to use reason as much as I can. Learning from Ian was significant for me in that sense. I learned you don’t have to shout – I never heard him raise his voice, ever. It was the calm application of logic and reason to a problem, not banging a fist on a table or shouting, ‘You can’t handle the truth!’ My style is: reason always and aggression when required.
There was a case I did a while ago when we were suing a private individual who had cooked up a fraudulent scheme. It was apparent that we were on to something. The defendant was going to face a problem, and his solicitors in desperation started making accusations at me, threatening to report me to the SRA. I was a young partner at the time, and I took it more personally than I should. So I went to Stephen Paget-Brown, who at that time ran Travers’ disputes team, and he said: ‘That’s how you know they’re worried. Don’t fret.’
In the mid 2010s I did two large investigations for the Bank of England. There was a day when I had to present the conclusion to the directors and the then-governor, Mark Cairney. There I was in this beautiful room with the governor of the Bank of England sitting across from me. It was a moment when I thought: ‘I’m doing something with my career.’ It was item number two on the Today programme. My parents saw it and knew I was doing something quite prominent.
I’ve been to so many places where I’ve felt lucky to be there. There’s a road between north-western China and Pakistan called the Karakorum Highway, which runs through the mountains. It’s a particularly beautiful part of the world. Very remote, very beautiful.
I’m Scottish, born and bred. I like whisky. I went through a stage of liking whisky a lot, I used to have a big thing about Macallan.
I love sports of most kinds, anything with a ball. I’m a fan of Dundee United – I grew up in Scotland in the 1980s when Rangers and Celtic dominated (as they always have). But for about five or ten years their duopoly was broken by Aberdeen and Dundee Utd. We won the Scottish Championship for the only time in our history. We were called the ‘new firm’, instead of the ‘old firm’ of Rangers and Celtic. Dundee Utd got to the European Cup semi-finals in 1984. We beat Roma 2-0 at home and lost 3-0 away, with two penalties awarded. Our fans have always made suggestions of brown envelopes given to the referee…
I force my children to listen to my late 80s/early 90s indie music. The Stone Roses, that sort of thing. Radiohead. They just say: ‘Dad, please turn it off.’ My daughter is massively into Olivia Rodrigo. When it’s just the two of us in the car that goes up to max volume and we sing together. Favourite album? OK Computer.
I like my Russian literature and film. There’s a film called Burnt by the Sun. It’s about an ex-Russian soldier during the Stalin era who lives in this beautiful part of Russia with his family. But all the while the Stalinist net is closing in on him. It’s not a jolly film, but it’s wonderful.
Life mantra? I am a glass-half-full kind of person. I’m always willing to see the best of things if I can. As a leader specifically, it would be: ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’
Rob Fell is a partner and head of the dispute resolution team at Travers Smith.