I started at Paisner and then on qualification went off to Norton Rose. I joined Clifford Chance in 2000, which was the big global merger. They were a challenger in M&A. That’s why I chose them.
I started off at Midland Bank in Fleet Street opposite Freshfields. One of six trainees. Later I sent out 86 applications for articles. Four interviews and only one offer would pay my law school. That’s why I went to Paisner.
Before that I was an equity salesman at Kleinwort Benson. Thirty-one years ago this month I walked down to what’s now the Walkie Talkie and did a summer job, which was meant to be two weeks, at the biggest dealing room in London. It turned into 13 months. I was doing most of the equity sales on their real estate property desk. The two guys I was working for were mostly doing M&A and advisory stuff. I thought: ‘That’s what I want to do.’
Exciting as the trading floor was, I used to say: ‘I never want to be in an office shuffling paper.’ So when I was interviewing I was a bit stupid in saying to lots of very fine banks who I now work with: ‘I only want to do this equity sales thing for a while and then move into the proper corporate finance stuff.’ That didn’t make it easy to get the best role.
I was at City University at its business school. It was the day of the BP flotation and the hurricane [in 1987]. They had soldiers abseiling down the BP building, which we could see outside the business school, and one of them got stuck halfway down. That was the first flotation where the underwriters got left with the stock for years and years.
The head of the banking school was late for our lecture – he had lost so much of his portfolio that day. The world was slightly collapsing around us. I was a first-year student at the time, having a great time, not working very hard… I didn’t realise how fundamentally the City was changing.
I was there on the trading floor on the morning of the Big Bang on 19 October 1986. Roll forward a few years – there are no UK investment banks anymore except Barclays. There are also great boutiques – your Rothschilds, your Lazards – but the City has changed immeasurably. It wasn’t the best time to be trying to be a junior merchant banker, as they were called then, so I went down another route.
The world was slightly collapsing around us. I was a first-year student. I didn’t realise how fundamentally the City was changing.
What’s happening at law firms now is similar to back then. The shake-out that’s happening now post-financial crisis, and the rise of the US firms in London and across the world, is similar to the changes that took place then. The Magic Circle didn’t exist when I started and Clifford Chance was the big mega-merger. Now we are seeing a seismic shift, which will determine who will be in the elite category of global law firms.
I was going to Paris on a 5am Eurostar for meetings on the merger of BAE Systems and EADS’ mega deal that didn’t happen. I was on a conference call as they called the train, yacking away. I showed my ticket, got on the train. My colleagues texted: ‘Where are you?’ I told them what carriage I was in. They said: ‘You’re not.’ There was an announcement: ‘Welcome aboard, we’re off to Disneyland Paris.’
I don’t speak French so I had to go down to someone in the buffet cart and say: ‘Pardon monsieur, est-ce le Eurostar Paris?’ ‘Non, monsieur, Disneyland!’ Oh, shit… The chief of the train wrote a little note and said if you get off the train at Lille you can run across the platform to another train; this is a letter to my friend on the other train. I got on the other train, the chief tut-tutting. I arrive at the Paris meeting and a whole table full of people were making Donald Duck noises.
I can remember one deal with a partner at CC who once lost sight in one eye at three o’clock in the morning at Skadden. He said: ‘You’ll have to finish this meeting.’ He had glaucoma through exhaustion. We had some challenging clients on each side. I went on holiday the next day and had been up for five days. I said to my wife: ‘Don’t give me any tickets or passports, just push me through the airport.’ I woke up in Thailand, basically.
Clients like it when they develop a relationship with a mid-level associate who is punching above their weight and then they translate into partner. There’s few things that will draw a client and a firm closer than that. It’s great to see people who come to the door, are finding their feet as a junior or mid-level lawyer, they get feedback and guidance and they grow into partners. It’s a satisfying process.
Most days I’m running from A to B to C to D thinking: ‘Why did I sign up to this?’ But that’s one of the best things about the job. You do all sorts of different things. The role of being a partner is to juggle more than is reasonable to juggle.
The longest stretch I’ve done in the office is 110 hours without stopping. I have got over the 100 hour mark many times. I don’t want to do it again. I remember the 2014 rescue of The Co-operative Bank was one where [CC partner] Iain Hunter and I were almost unable to speak. I kept saying: ‘You have a kip, then I’ll have a kip. Let’s be sensible.’ He kept saying: ‘No, no, no – we’ll get there.’ Whole days went past…
Adam Signy, Matthew Layton and Guy Norman are the three partners at CC I worked with that most influenced me. They’re all really good lawyers and they all enjoy it. Most people would say they’re all very good client-handling lawyers probably more than they appear to be good technical lawyers. But they are very good technically and that’s the magic. And they’re all very good at developing other people.
I arrive at the Paris meeting and a whole table full of people were making Donald Duck noises.
It was very difficult leaving on my last day at CC because one becomes more institutionalised than one realises until you disengage. I worked with a lot of people that I liked a lot for a long time. I had a gap before arriving at White & Case. It was all very exciting and I knew a lot of people here partly through the recruitment process but also, with the firm growing so quickly, there are a lot of people that I had worked with or come across over the years.
It’s a lumpy business, corporate M&A, and there is a degree of uncertainty during Brexit so it’s harder to see what our flow of business is going to be. You have uncertainty over regulation in the US, Mr Trump is finding it difficult to put forward the deregulation, our political leaders are conspiring to make everything worse than we could possibly imagine. It shouldn’t be a killer of deals with strategic logic, but we’re in a very challenging environment.
A big turning point was the Kraft/Cadbury deal. That literally changed the takeover rulebook. Since then we have seen fewer private equity houses showing interest in UK-listed targets. Because there’s [fewer] financial sponsor buyers and more trade and strategic buyers, the use of share consideration has increased, so that’s how public M&A has changed – the central gravity of what’s the standard deal.
A lot of the household names as I grew up professionally don’t practise anymore. The list of very impressive operators, elder statesmen and women, is going to change completely over the next two, three, five years. We are in a dynamic phase of that. It’s interesting to speculate on who the next list is going to be.
I was at a CC partners’ conference with 500 partners from all over the world on the morning of the Brexit vote and we had a bunker in an underground room with all these screens set up with CNN, the stock prices and everyone on the phone. I went to bed from the bar late and woke up with the radio on, and I honestly could not process: ‘Britain has voted to leave the EU.’ I thought it was a joke.
I ran down to the bunker. But it was really great being in a team, working the phones, looking at all the announcements, advising clients… like being back on the trading floor 25 years later.
My experience of speaking about Brexit with C-suite people has fallen into two categories. The first might be very excited about it personally, or have strong opinions, but for their business it’s not such a big deal and it’s just the general economic impact of Brexit which will affect their businesses. The other category are people whose businesses are hugely affected by Brexit – the financial services sector massively so. They’re looking much more at the minutiae of what individuals they should place where, their books of business, their entities, detailed structural analysis – I don’t see much in the middle.
Patrick Sarch is a corporate partner at White & Case