Life During Law: Paul Dolman

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Life During Law: Paul Dolman

I certainly didn’t have a burning desire to be a lawyer from the age of five years old. I definitely wasn’t one of those! I wanted to be an architect but you’ve got to be quite good at maths. I wasn’t.

My parents instilled in me a real work ethic from a young age and forced me to do lots of summer jobs where I learned the value of money. The worst one was probably working at Saxby’s pork pie factory. I was in charge of the jelly gun. Thousands of pork pies would come down a long conveyor belt and I had to put my gun in them and fill them with jelly. That was a challenging job to stay motivated in for sure. That probably put me off pork pies for life. Continue reading “Life During Law: Paul Dolman”

Life During Law: Nick Vamos

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Life During Law: Nick Vamos

Did I always want to be a lawyer? No. I didn’t think I wanted to sit behind a desk, so that hasn’t really worked out. I thought I might want to do something outdoors, and that hasn’t worked out either. I wasn’t one of these people that knows from the age of two that they’re going to be a forensic pathologist or a marine biologist. When I was at school and then university, my parents were very supportive and said: ‘You don’t need to decide on a career now. You don’t have to have a grand plan.’

I didn’t read law at university. I read philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge. Partly because it was the degree subject I was most interested in and partly because I didn’t want to study any of my school subjects any further. I converted to law a few years later. I think if I’d studied law at university for three years, I might not have become a lawyer. Continue reading “Life During Law: Nick Vamos”

Life During Law: Karen Seward

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Life During Law: Karen Seward

I grew up in a shipbuilding town in the north. Barrow-in-Furness.
Bill Bryson described it as ‘the very worst town in England’. It brought with it a sense of community back in the day. I’m working class and I kind of bring my middle-class self to work.

My mother is only 18 years older than me. My dad worked in the shipyards. He was frequently on strike for months at a time. I remember one summer my mother, who was a lab technician and worked in a school, went to work in the fish and chip shop at the end of the street so that we could have dinner. I grew up in that kind of cauldron of crypto communism. I was disrespectful of authority for authority’s sake.
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Life During Law: Robbie McLaren

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Life During Law: Robbie McLaren

University in my family was always something vocational. I hated science, so that was doctor and vet out the way. I did an accounting internship and found that just a bit dull. That really left law. That was basically it.

Studying law at university was awful. I enjoyed arts subjects at school, history and geography. I quickly realised that, when you’re studying at school, you’re rewarded for creativity. Studying law, you’re not. The first couple of years were just the building blocks of the legal system and it was very much – ‘this is what the rules are, you need to know them and apply them to the facts’. Overall, I’d give it a six out of ten, but the first two years were more like a three out of ten. Continue reading “Life During Law: Robbie McLaren”

Life during law: Peter Crossley, Squire Patton Boggs

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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!

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