Clifford Chance (CC) was a great place to be in the 1990s. Geoffrey Howe deserves a huge amount of credit. He instilled that we were on a journey everyone else was seeking to replicate. The car was travelling fast. The concept of delivering that globalisation was a very powerful thing.
I didn’t have a plan but a lot of fortune. I took a view early on that there were hundreds of great technical lawyers and I would never be able to distinguish on just that.
I wanted to be an M&A lawyer. I was disappointed when my corporate seat at CC was the funds/regulatory group, but that was lucky because it was 1989 and the start of the private equity (PE) industry. I did two or three of the largest funds ever raised in Europe in the first few years and there was relatively limited partner supervision.
Jonathan Blake at SJ Berwin had done a lot of work for the benefit of the industry as a whole and made London the centre of PE in Europe for fund formation. I rode on his coattails.
Persuading clients to be more challenging with themselves is incredibly satisfying because you’re able to quantify in pounds and pence the value you’ve provided. If you’re going to be successful, you’ve got to be a strategic and trusted adviser. You only get that from clients spending time with you and having confidence in you – you have to gain confidence, develop relationships and spend time with people outside the office.
You can’t believe your own publicity. I have a family that keeps me very grounded. I have a wife, two children and a dog. I’m quite clearly the fifth person in the house.
Tony Mallin at Star Capital Partners has been a great mentor. More recently, in PE, people like Charlie Bott at BC Partners and Jussi Saarinen at EQT Partners were people I would draw attention to as supportive.
Law is one of those areas where you can never be the best – there’s always something to strive for. Ultimately, the challenge is how I gauge happiness from the job. There are many more disappointments than successes. I’m a perfectionist – everything has to be right.
I left CC because I had achieved all I could. I couldn’t take it to the next step. We had built it out and Asia was good, but America was very difficult to crack. It became very obvious the strength of Simpson Thacher, Debevoise & Plimpton and Kirkland & Ellis was never going to be penetrated. After Lehman, the world of private equity changed. For the first time in ten to 15 years they didn’t really raise the money they wanted. Where it became a problem at CC, clients were saying: ‘The US market – that’s where the money is coming from. How do we get an investor to come in?’
Simpson Thacher is very family focused. If we ever want to hire anyone, any candidate will have to go off and have lunch with two or three associates, and if they say ‘he doesn’t fit’, we’ll nearly always turn them down. Simpson is entrepreneurial but in a different way. What CC did is build out its client base. What Slaughter and May did really effectively, and Simpson in the States, was not to broaden their client base but broaden the work they get from a smaller group of clients.
I’ve just come back from holiday and wasn’t interrupted once. It worries me a little that they don’t really need me. On my BlackBerry I have a list of all the things I would like to do when I retire and if I were to add up the number of years it would take, then I would have to live a very long time to achieve it all.
A big influence for me is Clive Stafford Smith, who runs the charity Reprieve. I admire Clive because he’s a much better person than me. He’s highly intelligent, but he’s pursued a calling. What I do isn’t a calling. My job allows you to enjoy the pleasures of life. Clive has turned his back on that to try and save people on death row.
The relationship between investors and sponsors is like a marriage. Investors want communication and a sense of belonging and need. When things turn bad, it’s often the reverse – it’s a two-way thing. The best people at this are the [investor relations] people who make sure that relationship transcends the giving and taking of money. So much of this is about trust.
City firms will continue to do well in funds. I have a lot of admiration for King & Wood Mallesons and its model. You have great lawyers at CC, Macfarlanes, Linklaters, Freshfields and Ashurst. It comes down to individuals. The decline of UK firms in funds is overstated. The press spent years trying to stir up something between myself and Jonathan Blake at SJ Berwin. It never existed. I admire him hugely.
I want to be a better person. I would like to apply my mind to give something back. Playing the piano is a great thing for a perfectionist because you’ll never be able to perfect it. There are some books I want to write and they will be sports-based. I’ve probably made enough money that I can pay for it to be published.
What sets the best lawyers apart are those who can understand people’s motivations and come to a deal. I read a piece recently that said: ‘The best lawyers know when to stop negotiating.’ Social interaction is so important. Nigel Boardman recently said it’s ‘ability, affordability, approachability and affability’. He’s totally right. LB
Jason Glover is a partner at the London office of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett
sarah.downey@legalease.co.uk