I come from a family of lawyers. My father was a lawyer and a judge, and my brother followed in his footsteps and became a lawyer. So there was a lack of original thought on my part. I just went with the flow and followed them into the profession.
I was born and brought up in India. I went to school there and did my first degree there, in history. When I was at university, law was rarely done as an undergraduate degree and that programme has only just been introduced. When I finished my first degree, I followed in my brother’s footsteps and came to the UK to read law.
When people suggested I should probably stay in London and pursue a training contract, I decided to do that. I ended up joining Ashurst way back in 1999. Here I am 21 years later still doing the same thing!
At the time I qualified in the City, Ashurst was one of the pre-eminent private equity legal brands in the market. I learned hugely from my experiences with the team there. I then moved to Kirkland & Ellis, another powerhouse, and you learn from working and dealing with people who are leaders in the field.
I have not had my head turned by an in-house role. The tide turned in the late 2000s when private equity firms started hiring in-house legal talent, but before that an in-house transition was never really a consideration as I did not do the sort of mid-level M&A work that sometimes saw lawyers move from private practice to a bank or a corporate.
What we have learned from lockdown is there is no substitute for time in the office when you’re a more junior member of the team. You learn through osmosis.
Over the last 20 years, since I’ve been in private practice there has been a paradigm shift in terms of M&A activity, moving away from public markets to private equity. That has been absolutely fundamental, even 20 years ago a number of private equity firms were very much starting out in their own business lines, so that has been fortuitous for me as my practice has been able to ride that wave.
The legal profession in London has seen an influx of US firms. That has changed the market dynamic, for the most part for good. It has made it much more competitive and it has given those coming up through the ranks significantly more options.
The worst day in the office was 11 September 2001. We were busy trying to get a deal over the line, it had a significant US component, but then the world came crashing down. My brother was in New York and I had other family in New York; I was hugely worried. I remember us all transfixed in the partners’ dining room, looking in horror at what was unfolding in front of us. At that time, every English law firm wanted a US presence but we were relieved we didn’t have our own people to worry about on the other side of the ocean. It was not the worst day of my career, but it was certainly one of the most poignant times during my 20 years in the City.
My best day in the office was the day I made partner. It wasn’t even equity partnership, it was non-equity partnership at Kirkland, but that endorsement was a career-enhancing moment for me.
I hope my team would describe me as tough but fair and, when not busy, very fun loving and up for a laugh. Fundamentally it’s about playing the game in a way that you inspire people to want to play it at some point in their future, and not making it uninspiring for those coming up through the ranks.
Because we’re a transactional practice, when our clients aren’t busy, we aren’t busy. As a result, the downtime we have is true downtime as opposed to a constant amount of work and constant pressure. For us it is very much peaks and troughs. But I enjoy that and a lot of people in private equity enjoy it.
I cope with the peaks and the troughs by having a very tolerant and long-suffering husband. I also really enjoy the downtime, so not worrying about when the next bit of work will come through the door. August 2020 was quiet, so I had almost all of August off to go sailing and it was magnificent. It was fortuitous it happened in August as opposed to October when the schools opened up again.
My husband is a very keen sailor, so we have a boat out on the south coast, so we do summer sailing whenever we can. I have two small boys at home who take up a lot of time in terms of engagement and having fun with them out of work. That and the job itself keeps me busy.
The first lockdown was a much more full-on experience than the second with the schools closed. The first time, the skill I had to teach myself was how to be a teacher to a small boy. I can tell you I am not very good at it!
I love cooking – not every day during the week – but with the lockdown when you find yourself at home cooking is incredibly relaxing. I cook all kinds of cuisine but being Indian and growing up with it I love Indian food, so I tend to do more of that.
I do a lot of reading in my spare time. I love all the Tom Sharpe books; he was an absolutely amazing author. In terms of movies, I love Lord of The Rings, almost all of Steven Spielberg. There is a trend towards absolute escapism. I was brought up on Bollywood melodrama and I veer towards that absurd fantastical stuff.
People have very short memories. We thought that after the 2008 crisis there would be lessons for our personal and professional lives to implement on a daily basis, but that didn’t happen. It is very early to judge if there will be a shift in how people work, but almost all organisations were shifting to a more flexible working environment in any event and a lot of people were not discouraged from working from home. We will see more of that and businesses will reconsider their approach. If we continue to roll out a vaccine that works, and we find ourselves out of the pandemic in the foreseeable future, I suspect things will revert to the way things were before the crisis sooner than some of us anticipate.
Positive discrimination for the sake of positive discrimination does not really achieve that goal of diversity. It has to come through systemic change.
What we have learned from lockdown is there is no substitute for time in the office when you’re a more junior member of the team. Almost all of what you learn is through osmosis; you can’t learn it from being a silent participant on calls – you learn it from being sat across a conference table together and seeing how people interact with clients. I feel really bad for people who are younger and coming up through the ranks, they’ve had the best part of a year where they have not had the benefits of that experience.
The profession is more tolerant now than it has ever been. I see Covid-19 as perversely playing into that, with people having more say in when and how they work. That gives women who might have small children a little more flexibility and latitude. Society is changing; men are more involved with what is going on at home, that takes the pressure off. But diversity is a systemic issue. Are we better at it than we were 20 years ago? The circumstances are such that we have the tools to make the numbers look better. But are there still glass ceilings in the profession? Absolutely.
Positive discrimination for the sake of positive discrimination does not really achieve that goal of diversity. It has to come through systemic change in society and systemic change in our beliefs and how we can manage work life and home life.
Our clients are increasingly demanding more diversity in the transactions we work with them on. Our recruitment efforts reflect a commitment to a more diverse workplace. There is a huge amount of pressure on the profession to pursue diversity.
I don’t think anyone has the ready-made characteristics to be a lawyer in their teens or twenties. So much of what we do is based on experience. When I look back on my career and so many of my cohort who are now in or out of the profession, there are some – and I include myself as one of those people – you did not think would last the distance and have. The sheer will to succeed in the profession is what makes the difference. Experience over time allows you to distil what your clients care about and what they don’t. You also need that time to develop a certain amount of emotional intelligence that allows you to deal with different personalities in different ways.
It’s important to not make it all seem very difficult. I don’t always manage it, but you should work hard and live life hard, and just try to not make it all seem like terribly hard work.
Anu Balasubramanian is London head of private equity and global vice chair of private equity at Paul Hastings