Life during law: Ray Berg, Osborne Clarke

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Life during law: Ray Berg, Osborne Clarke

My dad was a cab driver and my mum a factory worker. She was also a photographer’s assistant and met my dad at a wedding. After that she vowed to never drink again because she met my dad.

I went to a local state school in Wembley. I got into Oxford. There weren’t many people who went to university from that school. It was a very varied background; English wasn’t the first language for probably half of the kids at home. But it was a good school and I had teachers that cared.

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Life during law: Lord Dyson, 39 Essex Chambers

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Life during law: Lord Dyson, 39 Essex Chambers

I’ve enjoyed every minute as a barrister and a judge. Two careers. I’ve been privileged.

I didn’t want to be a lawyer. Even when I went to Oxford I didn’t know. I thrashed around, then stumbled into the Bar. I wanted to do something in the real world. My father was always starry-eyed about the Bar. I suspect that came into it too.

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Life during law: Jonny Earle, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher

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I don’t take anything for granted. I’ve been lucky, had some good breaks and people have invested time in me.

I can’t sing or dance. My partner thinks I’m like Carlton from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air when I dance. That’s one reason I went into law. I fancied doing something City-based. I didn’t know what. I came out with my degree and thought: what do I want to do? I applied for a law summer scheme to see what it was like and that was it.

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Life during Law: Aedamar Comiskey, Linklaters

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I’m the fifth of six children. By child five, your parents are very relaxed. You can do what you want! I grew up in a small town in Ireland. I was trying to decide whether to do law or medicine and two sisters were junior doctors, working through the night. I thought: ‘That looks hard – I’ll become a lawyer!’ Some irony there.

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Life during law: Apostolos Gkoutzinis, Shearman & Sterling

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Describe myself in three words? Passionate, impatient and aspirational.

I come from a small fishing town in northern Greece most lawyers would not know. A very traditional family, my father was a local civil servant, my mother a homemaker. We weren’t poor, nor rich. Modest in Greece in the 1970s meant no car, no television. But there was a drive to do better. My pushy mum, when I was ten, would give any Indian or Chinese mum today a run for their money!

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Life During Law: Stephen Paget-Brown, Travers Smith

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My career couldn’t be better. Nice work, nice clients, good money… The culture of this firm lends itself to being an enjoyable place to work. We don’t have the bureaucracy or warfare other firms have.

I started at Clifford Turner. Matthew Layton was still in shorts. The head of commercial litigation in the early 1980s was a South African called Leon Boshoff – very tall, powerfully built… Behind that fearsome appearance he had a razor-sharp mind. One of the cases involved Lloyd’s of London. He took them on four square. He taught us to be fearless and not judge a situation by: ‘Well, this is a reputable institution, they can’t have done anything wrong.’ Drill down. Find the evidence. Form your own judgement.

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Life During Law: Chris Saul, Slaughter and May

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Every time my father got a promotion we had to move. It trains you to fit in with new crowds. He worked for the Midland Bank. We lived in Carlisle, Shropshire, Birmingham, Kingston-upon-Thames and Manchester. It focused me on academic work as each new school had a different syllabus so I was always catching up.

I used to stand in our garage handing my father spanners. My favourite car in my youth was the Lancia Aurelia B20 GT, which was one of the classic Pininfarina designs of the ’50s. They were the embodiment of high-quality engineering. I went through a severe Lancia-buying phase in my 20s. I bought five!

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