I grew up in a shipbuilding town in the north. Barrow-in-Furness.
Bill Bryson described it as ‘the very worst town in England’. It brought with it a sense of community back in the day. I’m working class and I kind of bring my middle-class self to work.
My mother is only 18 years older than me. My dad worked in the shipyards. He was frequently on strike for months at a time. I remember one summer my mother, who was a lab technician and worked in a school, went to work in the fish and chip shop at the end of the street so that we could have dinner. I grew up in that kind of cauldron of crypto communism. I was disrespectful of authority for authority’s sake.
I remember when all the strikers went back to work and didn’t get what they wanted. I had a sense of unfairness that propelled me in the direction of the law. In my town, nobody really stayed on at school beyond sixteen. It was unusual to stay on for A Levels. I did law at university, a terribly uncreative thing to do, but I didn’t have much careers advice. I now wish I’d done something far more interesting like politics or history.
I’ve carried two beliefs with me through my life. Number one is that my view is as good, and carries as much weight, as anybody else’s. I adopted that from my dad. It was very much my father’s way and I’m vehemently anti-authority at heart. The second is that Liverpool Football Club is the greatest in the land.
I loved labour law at university. It was a niche subject and optional back then. I determined it was really interesting and that I wanted to be an employment lawyer. I left university and only applied to one firm: Simmons & Simmons. When I started work in 1988, it was the only firm that had a dedicated employment practice. I got a job there. I did two years of articles and nearly 18 months of that was spent in the employment department. I’m only really fit for being an employment lawyer!
I went through another couple of firms. Then I was opposite a guy on a deal who has since retired from Allen & Overy. Mark Mansell. At the end of the deal we went to a bar and ended up sitting there for hours. We got absolutely rolling drunk and, by the next morning, I had agreed to come to A&O. It was not a career of strategy.
I developed as a leader once I abandoned the ‘hero’ leadership style. When I was growing up in the law, I had this very top down, command and control-type style. Now I focus on what’s really important to me. I don’t think that people who don’t understand themselves can lead. Authentic leadership has become a cliché but it does promote inclusivity. Someone once said to me: ‘Disguises at work are dead. Nobody wears Armani suits anymore.’ That was illuminating. Leadership is about inspiring and motivating the people around you.
Jürgen Klopp [manager of Liverpool FC] is my leadership role model. He’s rooted in values and community and he’s got a real singularity of purpose. He gives love, is a bit tough on occasion, but he’s kind and empathetic. Those concepts are in very high value in big law right now because we are in pursuit of a culturally diverse workplace. We’re trying as leaders to unite geographies and nationalities and being kind and respectful in the working environment is important.
I’ve just got back from a year in California where we recently opened new offices in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. It’s one thing bringing people into established offices. There’s people around them and they can look into their office and say: ‘I’ve got this problem, how do I solve it?’ But in a place where you don’t have a shared culture, you have to build that culture. Everything that’s determinative of the employee experience is how people behave on the ground. People talk about culture a lot, but in a sense, it’s just a set of micro cultures.
No job was too small for me. I saw my role in the US to learn what we could do differently, but also to teach a sense of who we are, what we are about and what our values are. If you’re going to do an integration job, you have to throw yourself into it. I would get up at 4am, work on my day job till noon, then the afternoons were all about the guys on the ground and what they needed. It was tough. Except on Saturdays when I was living the best version of my life. It was: ‘Let’s go to the beach on Saturday morning, the sun is shining. The sun is always shining.’
Silicon Valley has this philosophy that you throw things at the wall and hope something sticks. The partners that we’ve recruited in Silicon Valley and San Francisco have taught me that if you create the right environment for people, it’s fine to fail, dust yourself down and go again. That’s really important for creativity, because clients are looking towards lawyers now for more and more innovation – it’s not something we feel comfortable with all the time.
The best employment lawyers are always doing interesting things they can’t talk about. It’s like Thomas Hagen, the consigliere in The Godfather to Michael Corleone: ‘You don’t notice me, I’m not there, but I’m there.’ When I entered the law it was an operational part of client business. Now it’s profoundly strategic. Diversity, equity and inclusion is one of the top strategic priorities of most CEOs. It’s gone right into the heart of the boardroom. You’ve got to be a PR adviser, you’ve got to think about the tactical consequences of decisions. You’re dealing with human capital; you can’t reduce it to a textbook.
We followed a man, who had stolen some trade secrets from a client, all around the world. We had extradition proceedings, we worked with the CPS to get him charged, convicted and in prison. Then he left prison and we had a private prosecution. To say thank you, the client took us to a wonderful dinner at the Tower of London. We always referred to what the guy had tried to steal as the crown jewels!
People are coming back into offices looking to get the old magic back, but there’s none to be had. People are accumulating disappointment and they’re thinking: ‘What’s the point of what I’m doing? What am I here for?’ It’s a fragile time. Leaders who see in-person working as the future have got to confront how strongly employees, of all descriptions, feel about flexible working models.
Hybrid working is troubling. It’s got the capacity to amplify an ‘in and out’ crowd and drive a coach and horses through diversity efforts. The current hybrid working model we’re all trying to struggle with wasn’t a product of strategic planning – it came out of a crisis. Hybrid working is going nowhere. Some law firm leaders would wish it were otherwise, but that isn’t going to change. They’ve got to come to terms with that.
Big law has been making a lot of withdrawals from the culture bank and it’s time for us to put some deposits back in. I don’t think it’s a case of increased salaries. I don’t know where that arms race is going. If you embark on that journey, there’s not enough money in the world. At some point we’ve got to say: ‘Enough.’ You can probably buy people for a period of time but, unless you’re appealing to something bigger than their wallet, you’re not going to keep them.
The leaders of law firms who are trying to create inclusive work environments didn’t grow up in them themselves. The challenge is how to create a system that has a greater sense of belonging, with mutual respect and support. An academic said that minorities are canaries in a coal mine. What starts as a problem for the more vulnerable is just a forerunner of what will happen to all talent. Talent will turn away from the law unless we become much more inclusive.
I always wanted to be a journalist. I had no confidence at 16 that I’d ever get into the graduate trainee scheme at the BBC. Now I’d love an antique shop and sell half of the things in my house that I’ve acquired. I’m terrible at going into so-called antique shops and buying junk. California was a lot of buying American kitsch. Now I don’t know what to do with it!
I like food. I like football. I like Formula One. I love my dog, Hal. Everyone always asks if he’s named after the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s actually a nickname for Henry V! His show name is Prince Hal. He’s the best fed dog in London. I buy him steak from the butchers.
I love William Kentridge, the artist. There is an exhibition of his on at the Royal Academy at the moment. His art speaks to diversity, equity and inclusion in a profound way. He has been an incredible force for change in South Africa.
I was having a fully-fledged mid-life crisis at 39 and three quarters and I took up skiing. I went heli-skiing for my 50th in Valdez in Alaska. I’m always game to try new experiences.
The other naughty thing you should know is that I married my trainee. That was like 1993 though. It wasn’t socially unacceptable back then.
Karen Seward is head of litigation and an executive committee member at Allen & Overy. She recently returned to the London office from the US West Coast where she was tasked with integrating hires into A&O’s two new Californian offices which opened last year.
Portrait: Brendan Lea