I’m always in the present and think of the now.
You make your own luck. You have to put yourself in harm’s way. You have to be standing by the street when the ambulance goes by or you’re not going to be able to chase it. There’s a degree of intelligent positioning.
I come from a generation who have been very lucky. The role of law firms and lawyers went through a dramatic transformation in the 1980s with the Big Bang, and my generation rode that wave.
Part of law is dull and there are things that you hope someone else will do. But I am lucky because I do the things that interest me – things that are challenging, exciting or unknown. I always prefer to do stuff that people have never done before; that way I cannot get it wrong.
A lot of the work I did on the Lehman insolvency, nobody had ever done before. We tried to do a scheme of arrangement to give customers their properties back and, unfortunately, it was one of the few cases I ever lost. But it didn’t really matter as we did it another way. It was a monumental job; it was a lot of money; pension funds, investment funds and hedge funds had billions locked up. We got more back than they put in, so I’m rather proud of that.
We received a contract two days before Lehman failed. There was no pre-planning at all, which was one of the reasons it was such a mess. The assumption had been that it would survive and any planning was entirely undesirable because it made it more realistic.
We went in Lehman’s offices at Canary Wharf on Sunday morning and stayed there indefinitely. It was like MASH – very gory and endless waves of wounded soldiers coming in. We took over the top floor on Bank Street. I went down with two boxes of business cards, sat in a conference room and people kept streaming in with problems – ‘I’ve got this trade’ or ‘I’ve got this derivative’. I was giving advice on the spot to try to work out what to do. And this just went on and on and on, and occasionally I’d get a couple of hours of sleep and then I’d roll it out again. This went on for a few weeks.
Reading long boring documents is dull – that’s why I try to avoid bond issues. There are these huge fat prospectuses – not my favourite part.
It is all about people. You think clients like BP or Barclays are these huge faceless corporations, but they’re not. They are ordinary people.
I started at Wilde Sapte – a very fine banking firm. Robert Elliott and I were partners there together. I couldn’t achieve the things I wanted at Wilde Sapte – could never really do the absolute market-leading work. So I decided to join Freshfields, and gave up my partnership and joined as a senior associate. And Robert did the same and went to Linklaters. It was the first time Freshfields and Linklaters had taken somebody from another law firm. For 17 years we saw each other regularly.
I left Freshfields because I wanted to have a longer-term career. I made it very clear what my expectations were and Linklaters seemed happy to agree. Magic Circle firms have a very odd career structure. I’m not sure the historic template is the right template.
One of my heroes is Harvey Miller at Weil Gotshal – he’s got to be in his late 70s and is fully practising. He did Lehman’s US bankruptcy, he did General Motors… he’s done most of the major bankruptcies in New York and he does them – he’s the guy in court and he’s the guy giving the advice. Nobody seems to have a problem with the model that says you carry on working as long as you can make a contribution.
The London model where people step out of the frame in their early 50s makes you think: are these people talented or were they just bag-carrying? It’s not a sustainable model as the partnership carrot has been pushed further back. It will have to adapt.
There is a generation of finance lawyers that grew up with me. I used to be able to sit down on a banking transaction with a lawyer on the other side and identify who trained them, from what they did, how they approached the documents, their personal style – it’s a craft; it’s like a medieval guild. I could identify somebody trained by Tony Keal, or Michael Bray at Clifford Chance – it was a very personal thing and people had distinctive styles.
I’m not so sure that people learn the craft of law in the same way. There’s so much pressure on people to get things done quickly. One of the complaints clients have is that they don’t really get partner time. I like doing my own work, my own drafting, attend my own meetings and I like to answer my own phone. It’s a personal service.
Capital providers are changing from banks to funds. Funds are going to play an ever-growing role and it’s one of the big changes, and law firms need to consider how to move from servicing an RBS with all its systems, to serving a hedge fund with 15 people, with no systems and no organisation.
There is still an inherent instability in the financial system and no-one is altogether sure how this is going to manifest itself. We have sort of come out of the slump to some growth and economic progress, but the levels of debts and stresses in the system are all there. Something’s got to give. We have 20 years to go. Working through the process and changing the banking system is a generational thing.
David Ereira is a restructuring and finance partner at Linklaters
jaishree.kalia@legalease.co.uk