Renegade master

Bijan Sedghi is the type of lawyer most PR teams would keep a close eye on. He is a self-confessed ‘turbocharger’, with three BlackBerrys, a contact list that would make Richard Branson baulk and a commercial determination to be involved in every decision his employer makes.

‘Oh dear, the renegade master. What’s he been telling you?’ was the unperturbed response received when LB contacted Wragge & Co to discuss this feature. The informal culture that Wragges prides itself on seems to be a good fit for the energetic Sedghi, who has long refused to conform to the stereotype of an academic lawyer. ‘My experience was in building and growing businesses, and then managing them for the best profit,’ he says. ‘Few lawyers really understand that they should also be doing that for themselves as partners. They put the vocational aspect first, in front of financial efficiency.’

It’s a tough balancing act. Clients want commerciality and corporate nous, but the skills involved in spotting opportunities and risk-taking go against the grain for most practitioners. ‘There aren’t many lawyers doing what I am doing,’ Sedghi adds with his trademark confidence. ‘And I prefer it to be like that.’ So other would-be rainmakers who feel their job should be more than just blindly following client demands and executing contracts, take note.

Sedghi trained at Wragges, leaving in 1978 to join Edge & Ellison (acquired by Hammonds in 2000), where he became a partner and insolvency specialist. He’s far from tight-lipped on his reasons for leaving the firm. ‘I’m ashamed to say I left Wragges because I was offered a shiny new car by Edge & Ellison – who also matched my salary,’ he admits. When the insolvency bubble burst in 1984, he started to focus on M&A until the then Pinsent Curtis referred a client to him, Bromsgrove Casting & Machining, which was capitalised at £500,000. The remit was to sort out a long-running shareholder dispute that was, in Sedghi’s words, ‘a David and Goliath battle between the mighty Eversheds (acting for a former MD) and the tiny Jacobs Bird (acting for the chairman)’. Not only did he sort out the dispute, he was asked to join the board. Unsurprisingly, he felt he was in over his head. ‘Aged 28 and an insolvency lawyer, I hardly had the right credentials to join the board of a company quoted on the main market,’ he says. ‘So I refused. Only to suffer the wrath of my then senior partner, John Wardle, who told me to get on with it because it would help my career.’

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