The lift bank on my floor is the perfect length for a cricket pitch. My son’s old school cricket bat gets used and at 10pm it can be dangerous, as there is quite possibly a golf ball being chipped down the corridor. I have a number of dents outside my office. There is some valuable artwork on that wall, but nobody’s succeeded in hitting it yet.
I trained at Simpson Curtis in Leeds in the early 1980s, because I swore I would never come down to London. I just wasn’t going to come down to this nasty part of the world where it was a case of one-up-over-the-Joneses.
I was interviewed by a wonderful chap at Freshfields called David Rance. I arrived late, spluttering, after running the wrong way up the street not knowing London. It was about 2:30 in the afternoon. He asked me if I wanted a drink and I said I’d like a glass of water. He replied: ‘It’s after two o’clock, I was thinking something stronger.’
I was called into the office of a partner called Clive Rough. He said: ‘Have you heard of this thing called securitisation? It’s the talk of the City. You only have to do one and then you can go back to M&A. It will only take three months, so let’s go do it!’ Eighteen months later we close the transaction. He conned me, but as a result, I specialised in finance.
In those days, securitisations were done by three firms: Freshfields, Slaughter and May, and Allen & Overy. They worked together in a spirit of determination and co-operation to get the deal done, which was really effective. I learned a lot from partners at all three.
I had a lucky break in that Barings Bank crashed. We were advising ING in the transaction and I was sent in to do due diligence. We had a very short period of time, but because we did it quickly they asked us to find out what happened in Singapore. I went back to the team and said: ‘I don’t how we’re going to do this. It’s impossible!’ One of the guys said: ‘My brother works out in Singapore doing the same kind of work, so let me give him a call.’ He reported back exactly what Nick Leeson had been doing.
I was sent in to help ING restore business and sort all the issues with Barings. There were hundreds of creditors and a lot of my friends at different firms were representing them, so I was getting call after call saying: ‘Mark, we’re going to have to take action against Barings.’ It was a case of saying: ‘Please don’t – just give us another day.’ That personal relationship helped to delay things a bit and resulted in a better solution for everybody.
A lot of the really fun transactions are incredibly intense. You work like hell and in the middle of it you often think: ‘I really wish I wasn’t doing this,’ but as soon as it’s done you think: ‘That was great. Where’s the next one? I want to do another one.’
People think it’s strange to say that Skadden is collegiate, but it is probably the most collegiate place I’ve ever worked. I used to think Freshfields in the mid-to-late 80s was the most, but Skadden, even now, knocks it for six, which is quite incredible when you think the practice of law has changed so much since the 1980s.
Delegation is a real art. Quite often we will give responsibility to associates before they themselves think they’re ready.
I am probably more enthused now than I have been for a long time. The nature of the transactions I have been involved in over the past few years have been so incredibly challenging but rewarding; I’d just like to carry on doing those sort of things.
Law’s a great profession. If you enjoy it, you don’t really want to leave and one of the tragedies of Magic Circle firms is how in past years, they’ve nudged their partners out once they’re in their mid-50s. I don’t feel like I’ve yet peaked and I’m on the drop. I feel like I’m hitting my stride now, so I hate the thought of retiring.
When I talk to the associates I tell them to use the kind of language you would use if you were talking to your friend down the pub. Don’t use a whole load of Latin expressions, half of which they generally get wrong – its de minimis rather than de minimus – which annoys me because of my background in classics.
The same advice I give everyone is the advice my father gave me: the most important part of any business is the people – make sure they are happy. It is the men that make the city not the walls, as Thucydides said.
I do have some personal ambitions. I desperately want to catch a 60lb King Salmon; I want to achieve a Macnab; and I’ve got a small vineyard in Berkshire so I’m desperate to sell my sparkling wine into France at some stage.
Mark Darley is co-head of the banking group at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom
michael.west@legalease.co.uk