When I was 18 I left Vancouver to play ice hockey in university in Japan. That got me off on kind of an adventurous track. I grew up dreaming of nothing more than becoming a hockey player. When you try to do that in Canada, you work your way up through the junior leagues. And the junior leagues are tough. You leave home and you go live in a small town, and the hockey team is sort of the centre of life in those towns. You become a minor celebrity. But it’s tough. Not many people make it. There are three levels of junior hockey in Canada, and when you get to the very top level you can be classed as a professional, which means you’re ineligible for university scholarships. I got up close to that level and I had a good look at it and I wasn’t convinced that I was going to make it. I didn’t want to take the risk of dedicating my life to that. So I decided to go for a university education, to at least get something out of all that time playing hockey.
I decided to become a lawyer so I would have more control over my working life than I would have had if I had gone into foreign relations. I did politics as an undergraduate in London. I came to the UK in 1994. As far as I got down the politics line was interning for the Member of the European Parliament who was the special rapporteur for EU-Japan economic relations. I got to spend some time in the circus that is the EU, moving that circus back and forth between Brussels and Strasbourg. It was interesting, certainly. But I just didn’t feel that I could make an impact in that world.
I was able to leverage my knowledge of Japanese language and culture to get started in commercial law. Without that it would have been very hard for me to get a training contract. I applied to a lot of firms and got rejected from a lot of firms. In the end it was a partner at Dentons called Richard Playle who was able to recognise someone who had potential who didn’t fit into that Oxbridge mould.
Coming to Skadden was an opportunity to step into the premier league. I left Dentons to come to Skadden when I was about eight months qualified. Skadden was a very disruptive firm at the time – it’s got a great history of being the kind of firm that comes along and pushes the envelope and changes the game. When I joined Skadden we were a very small shop – about 20 lawyers. But the quality within the partnership was unbelievable. You knew if you worked with these guys you were going to really learn the trade.
‘It ended up with a comedian throwing a foam pie at Rupert Murdoch in parliament. As a martial artist, I regret that I wasn’t there. But happily his wife was there to defend him.’
When I joined in 2000 it was right around when Enron blew up. That caused a lot of the energy companies to have to fix their balance sheets. I got pulled in by a US partner called Doug Nordlinger. He’s sadly passed away now. He was an amazing guy – super smart, amazingly curious, and with a great sense of humour. I spent a couple years with him doing deals for energy companies. He would really push you on the corners of the contract that people would often just skip over. He taught me that you need to focus on the details – to really care about your craft. Another really formative person for me was Michael Hatchard. He’s very well known in the City – one of the first major English partners to leave for a US firm. He really understood the social element. With the best will in the world, your client doesn’t care about what clause 17.3(b) says. And they don’t need to. What they need to know is, my lawyer had everything under control. That’s what they remember. You need to get beyond yourself and your perception of your own sagacity and how good you are.
One deal that really stood out was News Corporation’s first bid for Sky. That was real front-page stuff – not just top of the companies and markets section in the FT, but front page of the FT. Your alarm comes on and it’s Radio Four talking about your deal. That was a very lively period. It ended up with a comedian throwing a foam pie at Rupert Murdoch in parliament. As a martial artist, I regret that I wasn’t there. But happily his wife was there to defend him. That sort of thing, where it’s so much in the public eye, takes a very different skillset. You have to be able to say to your client, ‘You’ve got to be able to trust me. We’re going to need to move very quickly, and you’re going to need to run with me.’
I’m proud of the whole corporate team here. I never had anyone leave my public M&A team for another firm. Some people might say that’s a bad thing. But I think it’s a good thing. It means I’ve hired the right people and they’re engaged and enjoying the work they’re doing. Money is never enough. I always say to people, ‘Don’t do this for the money.’ Because, no matter how much money you get, you will get frustrated. It’s a challenging job. But if you love what you’re doing and you’re really motivated by it, that gives you the fuel you need to make it all the way through. And it paid off for us. We went from around 20 people when I started to closer to 200. In 2021 we topped the UK M&A market by value – we did $83bn worth of deals that year. That was a big thing for us. We were the first non-UK firm to top the UK markets by value. That was particularly fulfilling for me. Because the whole team was just performing at the top level. That’s how you get to $83bn in deals: you make the right decisions in hiring, and also in teaching and mentoring. You bring people along.
We’re here to do business – I’m not interested in how important you think you are or how clever you are or what school you went to or how you speak. I remember once we were doing a deal here for a US client. Both sides had flown in for a meeting. We walked into the conference room and it was filled with all the senior board members and their lawyers. And the chair on the other side had clearly decided that he was going to own the room. He launched into this five or six-minute monologue about how important his company was and how big a deal this was. And the chair on my side sat there, very patiently, and when the guy finished he took his glasses off, he leaned forward, and he said, ‘That’s a really impressive vocabulary you have.’ That sort of attitude is important on the business side and it’s important for lawyers too. It’s a perversion of the service when it becomes about us as these self-perceived grand people. You see it sometimes, where it becomes about you as a lawyer – about proving you’re smarter than I am, that you’re going to somehow win this intellectual battle. And the truth is, it’s not our money. Our job is to get the deal done and to make it work. And it’s the same for chairmen and CEOs, at least in a public company context. It’s not about them either. They’re there representing their shareholders, and it’s the shareholders who own the company.
‘Four pounds per square inch on the end of the chin is a knockout if you time it properly. It’s the same in the business of commercial law. You have to perceive where the market is going and put yourself in the flow.’
Building a conceptual framework from a range of different disciplines has been really important to how I do my work. I learnt a lot from martial arts. I started out doing Taekwondo and then I moved into 4D combat, which is a modern version of Jeet Kune Do, the system that Bruce Lee developed. The approach is kind of like a smorgasbord. Taekwondo was very much ‘stand and strike’. 4D combat is more subtle – it’s more about getting behind your opponent and breaking up their strategy. Speed and power isn’t really the most important thing. What’s more important is timing. Four pounds per square inch on the end of the chin is a knockout if you time it properly. It’s the same in the business of commercial law. You have to perceive where the market is going and put yourself in the flow.
I read a lot about strategy. There’s a book by Lawrence Freedman, the former head of War Studies at King’s College London, called Strategy: A History. It’s a real tome. It begins with primates. The three strategies primates deploy are social threats of violence, collusion, and deception. And the book goes all the way from there through to things like asymmetric warfare and nuclear strategy. It has chapters on corporate strategy, political strategy, even religious strategy – looking at the structure of the Bible and how that works, what it’s designed to achieve. In strategy there’s this concept called the OODA loop: observe, orient, decide, act. In any situation, that’s what you’re doing. You’re observing. Who am I? What are my skills? And then you orient. Where do I want to go? What do I want to achieve? And then you decide how to do that, and then you act. And then you repeat the process. And when you’re dealing with an opponent, you try to disrupt their OODA loop. While they’re still observing or orienting or in the process of deciding, you’re acting, changing the game, so by the time they act it’s a different fact pattern and they’re perpetually behind.
I love music. I’ve built a chopper, a Harley-Davidson, custom-built, fully ground-up, and on the underside of the petrol tank it has an image of Gord Downie, from The Tragically Hip. The image was engraved by a Native artist from the West Coast of Canada. I love the Hip for all sorts of reasons. Gord was a very perceptive, a very interesting poet. He has this line that I love: ‘It’s hard to say, it’s sad but true, I’m kinda dumb, and so are you’. I love jazz, too, a lot of blues. You know what they say – there are only two kinds of music: good and bad.
I don’t know that I would have changed much. Well, maybe there’s one thing. It doesn’t really go with the job – but if I could have spent more time with my family, that would have been good.
Scott Hopkins is a retired partner at Skadden.
alexander.ryan@legalbusiness.co.uk
Portrait: Juan Trujillo