My family moved from London to Essex in the seventies, we bought a big house with a big garden and were going to live off the land. We were basically seen as the village’s hippies – the obvious background for a City lawyer! It went wrong because my dad wasn’t very good at killing chickens, and I became very attached to a duck. He became a teacher to get an income to buy things.
I never decided I wanted to be a lawyer. I studied law because I wanted a fresh start. The school I went to – a large Essex rural comprehensive – did not traditionally produce Oxbridge candidates and I thought: ‘At least everyone is starting from the same place if I do law.’ But even then, I was clearly going to be a footballer, a rock star or a journalist in my head.
I got to the end of three years at Cambridge without a good plan but with a girlfriend who was still at university and thought it would be a good thing to do another year of studying. I got a place at law school and realised I needed someone to pay for that. That’s why I applied to various firms.
I was graduate recruitment partner for a while at Baker McKenzie. I felt ashamed because I interviewed all these young people and expected them to have had a burning desire to be a lawyer forever knowing that I drifted into it. I’m pleased I did, though, it was the right thing for me.
The most important advice I have been given in my career came when I went backpacking after law school. I travelled to Australia and got a fantastic job working in this guy’s boatyard: doing the manual labour, scrapping barnacles off the bottom, polishing, buffing up the decks. After three months’ work, this guy’s farewell was: ‘Tom, you’d better be a good lawyer, because you are fuck-all use at anything else.’ Whenever I consider doing something else, I remember those words.
As a trainee I sat in John Leadley’s office – now Bakers’ global chair of disputes. He gave me some really good opportunities. Harry Small and Michael Hart were also instrumental in giving me interesting work and good advice.
The best career advice I got was: ‘Tom, you’d better be a good lawyer, because you are fuck-all use at anything else.’
I was fortunate enough at a young age to work with David Pannick before he was really David Pannick, when he was just a brilliant advocate some people knew about but not everyone. That was influential, particularly for the clarity he brings to the job. He doesn’t waste a word, he works incredibly efficiently but is a very decent person to work with.
I had a period working with Ken Livingstone when he was mayor of London and I learned a lot from that. I learned how to brief senior people who are capable of absorbing information and making decisions very quickly. Whatever you make of him in the public space – particularly these days – Ken is the client I have had that can absorb information most quickly. He would run a meeting, get 20 different points of view on something important and come to a decision: his ability to do that was phenomenal.
I also spent a lot of time working with Ron Dennis when we were doing Formula One cases. His attention to detail is legendary and you can see why McLaren was so successful for such a long time. He inspires a lot of loyalty in the people around him.
One day we were flown to Paris for some urgent meetings on Ron’s private jet. It should have been the most showbiz moment of my career. When I arrived I had to remove my shoes to get on the jet. One of my socks had a hole in it and I had to spend the whole journey sitting in that very posh jet with my big toe poking out of my sock. After that I phoned my mum to tell her she was right about taking care of socks.
I loved my time at Bakers, I wouldn’t have stayed 23 years if I hadn’t. But Linklaters was an opportunity I couldn’t turn down. I like to test myself, and that was a chance to have a go at one of the leading firms in the world.
I had reached the point where I was making decisions about what to do in my career; I had to either commit to more of a management path or become more of a practitioner. I thought full-time practice would be easier to secure with a move, which has proven to be right. The business case for me was a no-brainer: I joined a tier-one competition litigation practice and had the opportunity to build a judicial review capability on the back of a strong client base.
Barristers are an enormous competitive advantage for the UK legal industry: a group of entirely dedicated, phenomenally intelligent, elite practitioners who are sought after on a global level. One of the nice things about my job is I can pick which barrister I am going to deal with.
The solicitor’s role has got a lot more interesting since I started. When I first started there was a sense that as a solicitor you could sometimes just be a postbox for counsel, whereas now we play a much bigger role in shaping the case around the client’s business needs and running and managing a counsel team.
The value that we bring when we do our job well is problem-solving. Looking at the law is not that difficult, applying it to the facts is harder, but a lot of people can do it. Applying it to the facts in global organisations with different politics and interests is really difficult. Helping them solve their problems using the law as a tool is challenging and extremely rewarding. I am pleased I didn’t get to become a barrister: the business context is very interesting.
I have been stressed, angry, sometimes tired but never bored. I am not sure there were many days when I came into the office thinking: ‘This is what I am going to do today’ and that is what happened. I really like that.
It’s a good career. You get involved with businesses almost exclusively at interesting times in their life cycle and get deeply involved in very important challenges and offer solutions, but without being exposed to the politics that comes with only dealing with one organisation.
I have three children. The period in your life where you have young children normally coincides with the hardest and most demanding period of your career. That’s tough.
The most showbiz moment of my career and I had to spend the whole journey sitting in that very posh jet with my big toe poking out of my sock.
I was lucky that my wife worked and even though she made a number of work sacrifices in terms of her career, she always insisted on having the time to do that, which meant I always had to insist on having time in my life to do the family stuff.
What has been good for me is being able to work remotely. I have not missed out as much as people who were born ten years before me. I spent more time with my family compared to them, but I definitely also spent more time with my clients. And that’s been the real challenge: I have always managed to be physically there, but being physically there and not on my BlackBerry or iPhone is harder.
When I started work you would come into the office to a pile of letters and you would know pretty much how your week was on a Monday morning when you looked at your post. The normal turnaround time for a piece of work for a very demanding client was a week. Now it’s an hour.
It was slower paced, but you were tied to your desk. I lost count of how irritated you would get just sitting waiting for someone to send you something. You would waste hours of your time just waiting for people to do things.
I’d like to make a success of what I am doing here. If we can secure the commercial litigation practice and the public law practice in the top tiers where they belong that would be nice, but at the moment I am just enjoying doing my work.
I don’t plan to retire: I plan to stop wanting or needing to earn money in return for my work, but I am with Sir Alex Ferguson when he says that retirement is for young people.
marco.cillario@legalease.co.uk
Tom Cassels is a dispute resolution partner at Linklaters