I was supposed to study economics and realised I was not a very good economist. Then I went to study law in Israel and almost from the first lecture it all made sense. It explained the rule of law means we’re all treated equally and there’s due process if you get arrested. I come from Africa where in Zimbabwe and in South Africa there was no rule of law for black people.
I was hooked early on, but wasn’t hooked as a litigator. I thought I’d be a corporate lawyer, come to England, get involved in all this big M&A and it would be a fantastic, go-go, rock ‘n’ roll thing.
By the time I got to England to do a masters we got into a recession in the early 1990s and I had to re-do my modules. I joined SJ Berwin. They couldn’t put me in corporate – there were no places. I had to go into litigation, kicking and screaming.
Litigation was on the seventh floor, which almost felt like a firm apart. I opened the door and saw this buzz of activity, and all these people screaming and shouting, and all these big personalities. All action stations. I called my wife after three hours and said: ‘I’m never leaving.’ And I never did.
What I liked about litigation then was the sense you were doing things immediately. There were a lot of low-value cases so you were running down to court all the time and making applications. It was the period before Woolf [the 1999 reforms of the Civil Procedure Rules], which is a seminal moment in litigation. Before Woolf you used to write seven or eight letters a day to your opponents and you’d get seven or eight letters back. I remember spending three days in a cost application. Woolf said: ‘This is all wasted time.’ And it was. Things changed. Litigation evolved.
In the 1990s there was lots of insolvency-related stuff. We were acting for one of the big contributors to the BCCI case, the biggest blow-up in the history of corporate activity, and it was all international with activity in England, the States, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The corporate stuff was domestic in those days; litigation was immediately international and London a magnet for international disputes. Still is unless we mess it up.
SJ Berwin couldn’t put me in corporate. I had to go into litigation, kicking and screaming. I opened the door and saw this buzz of activity. I called my wife after three hours and said: “I’m never leaving.”
Regrets? I’ve got a great one: the demise of my former firm. I left King & Wood Mallesons [then the legacy SJ Berwin] on 13 January 2017. It went into administration just a few days later so I’ve got a great regret because it was a grand project, which failed to reach fruition because of the culture. I had a lot of friends and colleagues I’d worked with for 25 years and we all went in different directions. My biggest regret is seeing a firm which was a brilliant place to be a lawyer fall apart.
I’ve been lucky in my career. When you start in law you’re looking up and learning from everybody, and then when you get older you work with the younger people so you have these fantastic opportunities.
My career has been in three stages: a lot of insolvencies in the early days and big-ticket cases like the BCCI, but then the hedge fund cases in the early 2000s and then the oligarch cases started coming. If you ask most litigators, they’d probably say the last 15 years have been the most memorable because those cases have made London an exciting place to be.
We had this oligarch client giving evidence in Russian so there was a translator. But [the client] refused to give a straight answer to any question. We’d ask him if today was Monday and he’d say: ‘Well it depends because the day in New Zealand is Tuesday.’ The judge was getting fed up and said: ‘Just give a straight answer.’ The client said: ‘My lord, but it does all depend. For example, one hair on your head is not enough. One hair in your soup is too many.’ The whole court room was laughing.
I once flew into Bucharest with two ex-Scotland Yard investigators on a case. As we landed, the client’s consigliere called me to say the client’s bodyguards would pick us up, but we shouldn’t speak openly in front of them, as the clients were not sure whose side they were on. I turned to the investigators to say: ‘We’ve learned two pieces of information: firstly, that we need bodyguards; second, that we can’t trust them.’ It felt like a very long ride into town after that.
To be a good litigator you need magic with the clients, which is what differentiates good lawyers from the great lawyers. You’ve also sometimes got to be extremely blunt with the clients. I like to deal with the decision-maker as opposed to in-house counsel. Often these decision-makers are extremely adept at getting their own way and a litigator’s role is different to most other lawyers because 90% of their working lives they will make the final decisions and you’ve got to win that confidence of clients very early on.
Weaknesses? I am passionate and can get short and sharp, usually with the opposition. Greatest strength? I am good with the clients and good with the lawyers. I am decisive. Maybe that’s because of the Southern African background.
Just because a senior QC says one thing that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s what we’re going to do. It’s a very important point of view, but every person in a team has a role. We had a case ongoing for over ten years with multiple rounds of disclosure, and it ended finally because in the final round the opposition disclosed the one document that displayed their culpability, which was picked up by the trainee. It was buried in the thousands of other documents and the trainee won the situation.
I wouldn’t have stayed in the law as a corporate lawyer. Not to be disparaging, but you’re implementing somebody else’s strategy. I want to be running the case. I don’t think I could do anything else. One of the great things about US law firms is they give you an extension on your career. The US firms are not super keen on retiring everybody at 60.
I said: “We’ve learned two pieces of information: firstly, we need bodyguards; second, we can’t trust our bodyguards.” It felt like a very long ride into town.
We’ve got one associate at the moment and you can see he is just a magnet for work, whereas the lesser lawyers will struggle to find work. That is just a reality. Good people are always busy.
David Shapiro, who was the father of mediation, was a big influence. He was US practitioner who came to this country in the late 1990s at the age of 70 and worked at SJ Berwin for ten years. He taught me more than anybody else. Key lessons: don’t fall in love with your own case, which is a real danger. In a mediation context he came up with this great phrase called the dialogue of the deaf. Everybody is talking and nobody is listening. You see that all the time.
My work/life balance is good, but it’s a continuous battle. I realised when I got into my 40s the allure of being in the office after 7pm the older you get diminishes to zero, which is why you need great associates. That doesn’t mean you’re not online at home. Everybody goes through these rites of passages and then when you get to become a senior partner, if you’ve been smart, you’ve created a pyramid of good people supporting you, who then go off, be partners and create their own pyramids.
The place I go to every year to relax is Mozambique, back to my childhood days because we’d always go from Zimbabwe to Mozambique on holiday in the 1970s. I’ve rediscovered it in later years. And Ibiza, for the yoga on the beach. I’ve been to Ibiza ten times over, but I’ve never been to a club.
I’m working on having a hobby. It’s my biggest worry that lawyers don’t have enough time for hobbies. It’s a work in progress.
My favourite book is Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. It explained the way the world operates in a way that I’d never thought of before. We always assume that when the agricultural revolution came it was good for human beings, but not necessarily. We may have been healthier before. The book is anthropological and sociological, and talks about the fictions that we adopt: currency, religion, patriotism, nationalism…
Annie Hall when I was a kid, but my favourite film now is Pulp Fiction. Quentin Tarantino is probably a genius because none of his films are about anything. No great message – they’re just trying to entertain you in a very distinct fashion.
The idea that London is going to diminish as a venue for international litigation is wrong. We’re getting bigger cases and one of the trends is that they’re going all the way to trial, and that’s interesting because in the early 2000s after Woolf there was a lot of mediations so a lot of things didn’t fight.
There’s a sense that judges in England are still the best quality in the world for international business. People always talk about there being competition between arbitration and litigation, which is all nonsense. There’s enough work to keep all these centres busy.
We’re going to have to cater for the Millennials wanting to have more balance and more variety in their careers, which is perfectly possible. I don’t buy into this idea that they don’t work hard and are flaky. What they’re not interested in is doing something for ten years and then being given a little prize at the end of it, which may be partnership. We’re going to have to be clever about how we do it. I don’t think you can sell this idea of put your head down for 20 years and it’ll all be OK in the end.
Craig Pollack is co-chair of global disputes at Covington & Burling.
anna.cole-bailey@legalease.co.uk