My career has been one of misfortune for others and fortune for me. I had two senior partners that died – one was very young, Alan Rosin at Bayer Rosin – he was in his 40s, I was about 30. As a result of his death, which was a huge tragedy, I inherited a practice.
Bayer Rosin was a unique firm. The partners were either South African or East African. South Africa was just coming through apartheid and so on his death the opportunities presented themselves. Many firms wanted to merge with us as we had a strong practice in the region. One was Mishcon… I brought about half the firm with me, others went their own way. The second person was the then-senior partner Martin Bayer. He came to Mishcon but died a few years after we joined.
I can’t say if I should have done things differently. Not because of arrogance… but I don’t look at life like that. I accept my life as it is, see the best, and move forward.
Growing up in an apartheid state, an unjust state probably fed my initial interest in law. It’s crazy that I ended up a commercial lawyer. My dream was to be a civil rights lawyer.
As a kid lawyer, in the days of Bayer Rosin, I single-handedly did the first privatisation in Greece. It was a crazy deal – Greece was like it is today. I can remember being on a plane to Athens leaving at 11 at night and I was the only person on the plane flying into the region with six crew. That was exciting, as a kid handling that. We never had the resources you would just chuck in now.
Any good lawyer needs to have a deep understanding of jurisprudence. It’s the foundation from which everything is built.
I did not see myself in management. One of the reasons I merged my firm into Mishcon, after the death of Alan, was because I thought I was too young in my early 30s for management. I wanted to do my work, work hard, play hard… Little did I know in a year, I would effectively be managing this firm.
One of the first things I did in management was bring in professional managers so I really pushed down a lot of the technical management to professionals and assumed a stronger leadership position.
The only lawyer that really impacted me when I was young was a guy called Nicholas Gould at Lovells. He was the first principal I worked for. He was remarkable. He showed me the discipline of how to manage a huge amount of cases and people and time. He had about four different partners working for him and they had associates, and his day was broken down between meeting each partner looking at every aspect of the case and making tactical decisions.
There’s many people I admire outside law. Jack Welch at General Electric, who brought in Six Sigma. I remember reading about that and thinking we need to do that in the law. Others were involved in social and political action so Gandhi, Mandela, Obama… Bishop Tutu.
My family are my passion. I collect children. I’ve got four of my own and two stepchildren so that keeps me fairly occupied.
I like sport but I’m bad at them all. I follow football, rugby, cricket, tennis, golf… my music taste is eclectic. I grew up with reggae and heavy metal. South African music was political. When you grew up in a distorted political system like apartheid you either were with the government or against, or with a society or against, and music was the unifying factor. I had Dylan on one side and Marley on the other… but, you know, I’ve listened to Eminem.
We’re never going to be where we want to be. The culture we’ve built here will die if we ever become comfortable. Every lawyer here, what gets them out of bed is the paranoia that the phone won’t ring again, that something will go wrong and everything will fall down.
We were lucky and brave, making investment decisions during the recession. We were adventurous. Of my generation in the firm, there were 25 of us in leadership positions in 1995 through to now. There’s a hardcore group of people that know and trust each other. That allowed us to make mistakes and try things. You don’t have to get it right every time.
It’s an open market – you have to find your own unique selling proposition. We try to understand where we’re brilliant and where we’re not so brilliant. I’m happy to compete against anybody.
In the law you have a huge waste of talent. More than 50% are women, they move up the career path, then have children. Firms aren’t agile enough to deal with that. What a waste of money and talent! I don’t want to lose people. The comments I got for saying this before, people telling me [allowing staff to choose how much holiday they want to take] was a ploy to get people to work harder, what bullshit! This was a pure thing to say: ‘Let’s deal with life as it finds us.’
The mystique of law is breaking down so that 90% of what lawyers do, whether they’re Mishcon, Slaughters or Linklaters, is process-driven. Those processes will be better served by machines and computers. Those in our space will focus more on high-end advisory. I’m sure that will happen.
Life wisdom? None… have fun? No. None.
Kevin Gold is managing partner of Mishcon de Reya
sarah.downey@legalease.co.uk