I nearly drowned in a river in Wales when I was four. It had been raining a lot and the boulder my brother and I were standing on beside the river toppled into the water. I fell into the river and was held under by a waterfall. My mother, father and a passerby all dived in and managed to find me and bring me to the surface. I learnt to swim right after that and now I still swim several times a week and it’s an important part of my fitness.
I always had a sense at high school that I wanted to do law but I’m not entirely sure why. Ridiculously, it was probably partly watching things like Perry Mason and LA Law on TV as a child. I didn’t know any lawyers; I was the first person in my family to go to university on either side.
In a fit of 17-year-old pique I turned down Oxford University, having passed the entrance exam, and went to Manchester instead. My school hadn’t sent anyone to Oxbridge before. I got into St Peter’s College, which was apparently where Northerners went, only to find out afterwards that they didn’t offer English law and French law, which I wanted to study – only straight law. I wanted to spend a year living in France, so I said no.
Objectively it was a silly thing to have done but I think it worked out fine for me. My parents were really supportive and I went to Manchester and had a very good time doing English law and French law there and in Dijon. In some ways it pushed me on – I felt like I had something to prove… that I could be as good at Manchester as I could have been at Oxford. It gave me a lot of drive.
I’m doing the London management role slightly differently to many others because I’m still practising 100% as well. And in my particular space, competition litigation, which is an incredibly busy, fast-evolving area, 100% is basically more like 150%. It works because there is a great management team around me and we do it all together.
At heart I’m still a geeky lawyer who really likes being involved in the cases. US-style opt-out class actions for competition damages claims have been a complete game changer. We’re still really establishing the law in this space. It’s an exciting time and I wouldn’t want to miss out on any of that.
It feels like you’re at the cutting edge in a place like this. We’re plugged into many of the cases that are groundbreaking, the cases that are moving the law on. And I love that, and love being in court trying to get the best result for our clients.
Mastercard has been super-interesting. The case is very much not finished but we’ve had some good successes along the way that have reduced the value of the remaining claim hugely. It started at more than £17bn and is now worth well under a billion on our view, with a number of issues still to be addressed that will remove or significantly reduce the remainder. It has been a really interesting and groundbreaking matter to be involved in.
I wouldn’t have known anybody earning the sort of money our NQs get now when I was growing up. It’s a world apart from my own background in a Yorkshire village. When I first started at Freshfields as a trainee, I was on £16,000 a year, and was losing money living in London on that salary. Things have changed a lot.
If you want to attract the best and the brightest people to your organisation and give clients the very best possible advice from the best practitioners, then you’ve got to compete for that talent, and the competition is fierce. You can’t ignore the market reality.
Mistakes happen occasionally; it’s how you deal with them that counts. When I was an associate many years ago, I accidentally sent an email to some people at a client who shouldn’t have received it. It was meant to be to the client’s GC and I was basically whinging about the fact that various senior people at the client end hadn’t done some things they had promised to. But I inadvertently sent the email to them. As the email left my outbox, my blood ran cold as it does when you know immediately that you have messed up.
I went straight to see the partner, Rod Carlton, and he was brilliant. We called the GC together and he was also brilliant. He took the view that the bottom line was that the people at his end really hadn’t done the things they were supposed to have done so he didn’t mind it being called out, and if there was heat to be taken over that then he would take it with us.
Everyone makes mistakes from time to time, but if they happen in good faith and you own up to them straight away, and bring your colleagues in, there’s very little that can’t be fixed. I’ve found throughout my career that people in this place will have your back and will fix things with you together.
Former Freshfields competition head Deirdre Trapp really inspired me. The standards she set on matters were inspirational and she was a world class communicator. So did numerous others like former managing partner David Aitman and Jon Lawrence, who headed the competition litigation team before I joined it. I’ve been a corporate lawyer, then a non-contentious competition lawyer and then Jon asked me to move over to the litigation side of competition work. Saying yes to that was the best decision I ever made. It led me to the career I love. I have a lot to thank him for.
My Dad was a cricketer for Hampshire; my brother was really sporty too. I did lots of sports but wasn’t really good at any of them. Turns out that’s because my ability was for motorsport and it took me a long time to find that out, despite karting a bit as a child and always enjoying that. I got there eventually and now I race in top level international motorsport, racing in the GT World Challenge endurance racing championship in the GT3 category, which is the top class in sports car racing other than the Le Mans Prototype cars. I’m racing against many of the best pro racing drivers in the world, who often started the motor sports ladder at four years old and never got off. It means there is an additional bit of lap time and speed that I will never be able to access because I didn’t do that. But I’m able to be in the mix as effectively a pro-am driver, as part of a three- or four-driver line-up depending on the length of the races.
Getting back into the sport late, I had to start right at the bottom at the grass roots level and work my way up. Now the races I’m in are major sporting events, often on TV. The big breakthrough for me was moving into GT3 with Bentley, then the Lamborghini thing came along – I won a British GT championship class with them last year. and then I got the chance to drive in the Abu Dhabi Gulf 12 Hours with McLaren. It went well enough that I got asked to do a full season with McLaren team Garage 59. So far this year I’ve raced at Circuit Paul Ricard in France, done the 24 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps, the biggest GT3 race in the world, I’ve just got back from racing at the Nürburgring in Germany and I have Monza coming up in September.
Racing is a passion and it gives me a focus away from work and a reason to keep fit – you have to be – and to eat healthily. It also helps me with time management; I have a reason to be efficient! I don’t really ever sit around and I hardly ever watch TV – I worry about that sometimes, about the risk of getting culturally disconnected, although I have just watched season one of The Bear.
I take a lot from the motorsport world into work life. For example, the structured approach to feedback and the use of data and metrics. In top level motorsport, 15 minutes after every session completes all the drivers and engineers are back in the race truck with the data. The discussion isn’t personalised, there’s no blame; it’s all about what happened and what could be done better next time, and putting a robust process around it. I really like that rigorous way of analysing problems in order continuously to improve.
I suppose I have a sports person’s mentality – I’m never satisfied with where we are. There’s a motorsport saying that if you’re standing still you’re going backwards and that’s also true in professional life.
It’s an exciting time in the legal world; especially now, vying to be part of an emerging group of leading global firms. There’s a huge amount to be done and be involved in making sure London continues to plays a central role in the ambitions of the firm.
We’ve done well in the US. We’ve hired some wonderful partners across a whole range of areas and our business has been absolutely transformed in terms of strength, breadth and scale over the last five years.
I’ve never been tempted to join a US firm. I’ve always been very happy here being in the best practice for what I do. I couldn’t do the quality of work, with the quality of people anywhere else. You can’t pick me, or the team I’m part of, up and just drop us on another platform and think it would do the same thing – it’s about the whole strength of this place, right across our global practices, built up over decades; you can’t easily replicate that.
I’ve no regrets. I’ve been very fortunate to get to work here and have the career I’ve had so far, and I’ve got many years of it left – I’m just getting started!
Mark Sansom is London and Dublin managing partner at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer.
georgina.stanley@legalease.co.uk
Portrait: Brendan Lea