The legal market has become more competitive. One way of measuring yourself is profit share. For some partners, the size of this share is very important. When I started getting offers, I realised money wasn’t something that motivated me. Other factors were much stronger.
I started out with a managing clerk – he was a bad influence in terms of litigation because he was at a stage where he couldn’t be bothered with the detail, but he was fantastic. He was the firm’s troubleshooter. Whenever the client had a problem – if there was fraud in the factory or somebody was stealing – he was the guy that got called in. He was like something out of a 1970s police programme. He was my first influence.
I remember sitting with the senior partner Martin Lampard, a City character from the ’70s and a huge influence on me. Would a newly-qualified lawyer be sitting with the senior partner these days? I doubt it. You literally sat at his feet.
Lampard had a ferocious reputation in the City. He used to act on many big executive terminations and we once went into a meeting, and it was a long meeting room, and I being the junior came in last, and by the time I managed to get all the way in, he had had a row with his opposite number and was walking out. The whole thing was part of his plan to manage the negotiation. I began to see there were different ways of negotiating.
I had a five-year period defending smoking-related claims. Two aspects were very interesting: I would attend lectures by professors of oncology and toxicology about the science relevant to smoking-related diseases – it was fascinating. The second was the client asked me to lead the response to the press. I spent weeks in interviews with journalists and making presentations to analysts. It’s only been in the last five to ten years that I have done financial institutions disputes.
One major case was Barings; that was a case run increasingly by a young lawyer here who wasn’t a partner at that stage – Ben Tidswell [Ashurst’s current chair]. I was pretty involved, but he did most of the running and sat in most of the trials.
It’s a bug-bear of mine – one wants to give lawyers more experience, but the training is not focused like that.
Some people think the law is interesting. I say that clients come to you because they have a forest in front of them and want to get to the other side. They are not at all interested in the trees they will go past – oak or ash – they couldn’t care less. They want you to take them by the hand and get them through the forest as quickly as possible.
My father affected me – he was a Chancery barrister and worked phenomenally hard. He taught me to just get on with things.
We have seven children; I can do all their ages and birthdays. All credit to my wife because I was in the office. But having a large family at home meant that I had a compulsory work/life balance. I was late home in the evenings in the week, but I didn’t see the point in taking big cases of paperwork home because I wouldn’t get the chance to read them.
I tried to put my children off going into law with a spectacular lack of success. My sister is also a lawyer and, when two of my daughters were in their early teens, my sister would take them out in her smart car and give them chewing gum and lipstick. That had an effect. At 13, my daughter said she wanted to be a lawyer. That was my sister’s influence.
The law is a fantastic career, but it’s very different now. I have been on the edge of the breaking wave almost all through my career. At every stage, it became more difficult after I had moved on. So I said to them: ‘Whatever image you have of law, if you’ve got it from me, it is now wrong, because it has changed.’
I have three daughters at three different City law firms. My wife said she would be appalled if we sent seven children into the City. So far it’s three in and three out with the final one being the tiebreaker.
The merger with Australia has been a success. Like marriages, you find out a lot more about each other after you get married or merge, no matter how careful your due diligence. In terms of the strategy of putting two firms together to grow in Asia, it’s been a spectacular success. The ability to do work in Asia has transformed my relationships with some of my clients in Japan.
Simon Bromwich was our previous managing partner, who is now head of disputes. Ben and Mary [Padbury], our chair and deputy chair, both come from disputes backgrounds, but to me it is not a surprise that litigators make good leaders because it goes back to dealing with people.
There are the people that see this as a great big Sparrow conspiracy to run Ashurst because they would say Simon Bromwich and Ben Tidswell were both ‘Sparrow’s boys’. That’s great, were it not for the fact that I stood to run for senior partner and was not elected!
I have been accused of being keen to dress up in fancy dress at Christmas parties. I do a mean Jack Sparrow, obviously, or Gandalf.
Edward Sparrow is a partner in Ashurst’s dispute resolution department
jaishree.kalia@legalease.co.uk