I was born in Nigeria as one of five children. My parents were medical doctors. My father was one of Nigeria’s pre-eminent neurologists, and quickly became globally renowned. A typical aspirational father, he built himself up through effort and excellence and thought all his children should be equally excellent. By the age of 15 I was sent to a boarding school in England to do my A levels. After that I did an economics degree at Queen Mary London.
I went back to Nigeria and did national service. Not as exciting as it sounds, more community service than military service. Did that for a year and part of it was working in a bank. It was not for me.
My eldest sister was a lawyer and thought I could do it, so I applied to Balliol College, Oxford, for a law degree. I didn’t know what it entailed other than my sister was doing it and it would keep my father off my back.
The biggest change was moving from day school in Nigeria in a university city to boarding school in rural Suffolk. Boarding school in a mainly white rural setting with the casual racism of the early 1980s was just shocking. It was also the levels of playground abuse about those less able or different. I was on the receiving end of a lot, but I stood up for myself.
Most of it was racism born of ignorance. People would say: ‘I gather you still live in mud huts in Nigeria’ and I’d say: ‘Dude, I have a house that could probably fit your house and 15 others in it.’
I became confident, sometimes arrogant, and would say things that were showy. It is a defensive mechanism. Over time it’s mellowed, and it’s one of the things that helped me in all the institutions I have been in. I’ve never been fazed by being the only one who looks like me.
I qualified in 1993, I look at my cohort and there were two black trainees, there were very few others, and no black partners. You look at the situation now, there’s still far too few.
The influence of luck is underestimated in success. Anyone who says they did it all because they’re brilliant is telling a big, fat lie. But the way you take advantage of the opportunities that fall into your lap is important. You meet people in life who could have been the wrong people, but they turn out to be the right people.
People would say: ‘I gather you still live in mud huts in Nigeria’ and I’d say: ‘Dude, I have a house that could probably fit your house and 15 others in it.’
I was worried whether I was making the grade as a newly-qualified associate, over-thinking things. I had to learn, I had six sessions of cognitive behavioural therapy, and I still remember the techniques. I meditate every day. I am also a practising Christian from a very contemplative tradition, which relies on silent prayer, which is very akin to meditation and mindfulness.
When I was made partner at DLA I didn’t get through the first time I was put forward. I remember David Hughes and Darren Allen said to me: ‘This isn’t because you’re not good enough but the time isn’t right because of where the firm is. What we do now is make your strong case overwhelming next time.’ I could have said, ‘I don’t trust them,’ but they were guys I worked with and saw the potential, and a year is no time at all. That was meeting the right people and having them invest in your career.
I’m fascinated by psychology and philosophy. I read a lot, it ranges a lot. The likes of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, which I have as a hard copy, an audiobook and on my Kindle. I always find something in it to inspire me. I also read a lot of Christian mysticism, the likes of Thomas Merton, and a range of classics. I started Crime and Punishment 15 years ago and didn’t finish, but I bought the audiobook and finished it.
I don’t listen to the radio these days. Why should I let my mind be dictated by someone else’s agenda? I put on my audiobook and go through my morning listening to something enriching.
Being a lawyer rarely overlaps with my other interests. I was speaking to some sixth formers at a free school in North London. They were bright as buttons. One asked: ‘What is the law?’ I haven’t asked that question since I was studying the subject at Oxford. I described it as the means by which an orderly society is underpinned, it’s made up of human fiction and the idea of a limited liability company sprung up from nowhere as it suited mankind’s human ingenuity to create it. The law is the result of the human mind evolving.
Holding a management position as well as fee-earning is a clash between the urgent and immediate and the important. You come into work, you have your day visualised, and then it’s ‘can I have five minutes’ with a partner. It turns into a 30-minute conversation with a follow-up with another partner. Before you know it, that business development call you had to make is now relegated to the next day.
When Lisa [Mayhew] appointed me to London managing partner I was surprised. I said: ‘Are you sure?’ She said that the partners trust me. I was on the legacy BLP committee responsible for dividing the profits that were distributed on a merit basis for six years. I got to know a lot of my partners.
I had already done a few things which engendered trust. That feeds into my style of leadership. There are partners who have larger relationships than I do, who are in charge of departments or clients’ teams. I don’t go around carrying a big stick. You could call it consensual, and it seeks to build alliances. I’m open about my limitations. I rely on good input from other partners.
To lead is to decide, and to decide is to divide. You’ve got to trust your own judgement and back yourself. Others may disagree, but it doesn’t make you wrong.
Without a doubt, this is the biggest challenge of my career so far. ‘Achievement’ makes it feel like it was something I was gunning for. In professional life, reaching partnership is an achievement, but managing partner is being given a responsibility, I wouldn’t like to categorise it as an achievement.
There’s there the tangible and the intangible areas of what the firm feels like. A tangible achievement is having a successful office move, it has to happen. That’s an achievement. But the firm is more than the building we inhabit. For me, success would feel like an office which is at ease with itself. Where the sense you get from being in the office is a hard-working commercial, client-focused law firm.
I don’t want us to be a law firm where the profit motive is the be-all and end-all. We have core values, but we have to live them. We can’t just have them on pieces of paper. Life isn’t transactional, it’s ultimately relational. If you can’t get that into the fabric of your firm, it isn’t sustainable.
To lead is to decide, and to decide is to divide. You’ve got to trust your own judgement. Others may disagree, but it doesn’t make you wrong.
My worries are how sustainable is the partnership model and how attractive it is to the next generation coming through who we want to bind to the future of the firm. Is it attractive to flexible ways of working?
I worry about technology, and the impact it’ll have on the training of the next generation of lawyers. I was trained when you had a partner who would check all the post coming in. I worry about technology’s impact on learning by osmosis, it can have great impact but I worry about how it impacts the human element.
I’ve stopped playing polo. I was obsessed by it, would play most weekends and try to get my handicap up. But I never could do it as much as I wanted. When the kids came along, and work grew, I couldn’t take off a whole Saturday to go off and play polo.
I like to think in my dotage I can get together with my old polo friends and have a knock about without too much competition. I still have my polo sticks and I look at them longingly.
The other thing I really want to do is pursue my passion for the study of human behaviour. Whether it means combining it with what I do now, and looking at the psychology of professional services, something like that.
I have stored on my Wish List a book called The 100-Year Life. It’s one of these books about the changing profile of the profession and careers. We have to cater for the possibility that we will be much more productive in our later years. You could hit 60 and begin a second career. I could maybe have a second career as a psychologist.
The notion of a work-life balance is too binary. The more interesting question is: to what are you paying attention? What’s taking up your mental energy? Attention management is a more human metric than just time management. I have a busy professional life, three kids and my wife. The focus of my attention is work when I need to be working and the kids when I need to be thinking about the kids.
My kids are older now. When they get older they don’t want to spend time with you. That’s the honest truth. Life now is more spending time with my wife, spending time in museums and galleries, seeing friends and exercising at weekends.
You have to find the right formula for you. All is as thinking makes it so.
Segun Osuntokun is London managing partner of Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner