I started life in South Africa mainly doing crime and divorce. Knowing something about criminal law, and the cut and thrust of the courtroom, is a good base for anybody who wants to do litigation.
I wanted to go to the Bar but my father was a bank manager in South Africa with a lot of barrister customers who weren’t doing very well so he basically said: ‘You’ll never make it so become a solicitor.’ Both my parents were English, my father was at Dunkirk and was badly wounded and captured so he emigrated to South Africa for health reasons. He was always a pretty strong character and was the sort of man who you couldn’t ignore!
I recall handling a big rape trial in Cape Town for the accused who was acquitted. It was one of those where he claimed the victim consented. In those days defence counsel were entitled to cross-examine the complainant in a way that would certainly not be allowed in England in 2015. The legal regime was very different in those days.
For every interesting crime case you get there’s an awful lot of real drudgery and rubbish stuff that’s not of use to anyone. And you have to do it.
I was getting into a lot of civil rights work in the early 1980s, dealing with so-called squatter evictions and I defended a number of conscientious objectors, people refusing to join the military on political and religious grounds.
You got noticed in the press and by the authorities if you handled those sort of cases. We sometimes wondered whether our phones were tapped. It was pretty bad. You never knew but we were very careful what we would say.
I came to Cambridge University in 1983 as the Thatcher boom was getting going. There were a lot of jobs in London and South Africa was in turmoil. I just decided to stay here. The City was exciting, it was the build up to the Big Bang in 1986, and the whole concept of investment banking arrived. It was a formative period that laid the foundations for the success of the City over the last 30 years.
Hammonds was a successful firm but when I first became managing partner there were issues to deal with. I needed to win over the partners and for them to accept the need for the tough decisions. But we came through it and the rest is history. It was a time of huge challenge and we’re now a very different organisation.
Hammonds was becoming an international firm and needed to find the next move forward. I didn’t want to become a bigger English firm and the move towards consolidation was already underway. That’s what led to [Hammonds’ 2011 merger with] Squire Sanders & Dempsey. The fact of the matter is that the largest legal market by a country mile, with the most opportunities, is the US. The Patton Boggs combination is about more heft in that market.
The temptation after the financial crisis was to stand still but you can’t, you have to move and evolve to a position where you can benefit the future of the firm. We’ve invested in our offering in Asia since the merger with Squire Sanders, opening four new offices there, but it takes time, effort and investment. It’s pretty tough in those emerging markets but in the long term that’s potentially where it’s going to be at so you’ve got to balance up long and short-term investments.
My job has hugely changed since 2010 because I’m not running the show; I’m part of a team. I may be managing partner for Europe and the Middle East, but it’s unthinkable that something significant would be done without our chairman and the partnership. We’re managed much more as a team than what used to be. It’s a lot more fun and works really well.
At the end of the day you have to look at yourself in the mirror. You get the coverage in the press that you deserve. The challenge for us is to build the firm’s reputation and brand. If we take care of ourselves the press will come after that. People who complain about what journalists write should take a look at themselves in the first instance.
If partners feel you’re not accessible that’s when you’ve lost it. You have to have a corporate structure but you have to strain so that the partners don’t feel they are powerless shareholders. Getting the balance right between running things as a corporate and partners still feeling this is their firm is a challenge. If you haven’t got a full diary with partner meetings then you need to be out there more.
The way things work in law are different from when I started but it all comes back to personal relationships and service delivery. Partners forget that when they’re saying they have a relationship with this corporate or that bank. No you don’t! You have a relationship with real live people inside those organisations. How many times have you been instructed to do work for someone that you haven’t got on with? That’s no different now from when I started out 30 years ago.
Peter Crossley is European and Middle East managing partner at Squire Patton Boggs
tom.moore@legalease.co.uk