I wanted a professional career. My father was a doctor but very keen I didn’t do medicine. I had a scientific background and law is a very analytical process. I’d watched a few television programmes about criminal lawyers.
Law was the right career for me. The life of doctors is very tough and there’s effectively one employer, whereas in law it’s easier for you to create a career because it’s constantly changing and there’s always something that can grab your interest. New people coming onto the market and changes in the competition make a massive difference.
I trained at a small firm, Lincoln’s Inn, which doesn’t exist anymore, and did private client litigation, but quickly realised this type of work was not for me.
The onus is on service and quality, and a client’s experience of working with a particular lawyer. Knowing the law is a given. Coupled with the increase in volume of cases, we’ve had a massive influx of lawyers from outside the UK.
Two key changes I have seen in the City: one is the opening up of London as a global financial centre and then most recently the downturn, which has created some change and has created more litigation. The recession created more business collapse and out of collapse you often get litigation.
I started doing litigation because there is a lot of law involved in litigation and I enjoyed the academic rigour of that combined with the challenge of having an opponent. In contrast to transactional work, you can be sure that whatever your client wants is usually what your opponent doesn’t want. It’s a game. You’re tracking your way through that and getting to the solution, notwithstanding that you’re going to be thwarted at every step by the opponent.
Way back, I was first doing commercial litigation and found I was doing more employment work. I established the employment and disputes practice here, but after a period of time I moved back to pure commercial litigation. Largely, the work I do involves unpicking the pieces of a transaction which has gone wrong, so breach of warranties following a transaction, shareholder disputes, picking up the pieces following a joint venture dispute…
Talking to clients is my favourite part of the job. I know that sounds trite, but it’s solving a problem: the client comes to you, and you have to chart your way through a messy conflict and find a resolution. Sometimes that means going to court or doing arbitration and sometimes it means having a resolution with the other party, finding where there is some common ground or whether there’s something you’re prepared to give up that the other party wants.
What gets me out of bed? The horrors of what would happen if I didn’t go in. Miss a deadline – that’s a total disaster. You go in to make sure things don’t go wrong, like missing a client, which would be a disaster too. There are attractions to working from home, but I get energy from working with people. I can work from home if I want to, but I choose not to and if you’re leading a team you need to be there.
What gets me out of bed? The horrors of what would happen if I didn’t go in.
Life as a lawyer is quite tough, but we don’t want people to sit in the office for the sake of it. We don’t believe in presenteeism.
We have high-quality work, but the environment here is regarded as more supportive than some other firms so we’re able to attract strong talent and we have a very low attrition rate. I see that continuing and us being able to offer something a bit different. We want to this to be a positive working environment.
To be a good litigator you need tenacity, resilience and to be flexible. We do a lot of bashing, but you can get bashed back so you need to be all three of the above. You also shouldn’t keep the volume on maximum on constant. You need to remain calm under pressure. You may be paddling very hard under water, but above water you should never show if you’re rattled by anything.
My best trait as a litigator is remaining calm. I don’t allow myself ever to look flapped. After years of experience, on the whole, you can spot the other side’s tactics. Say, if the other side has lobbed a grenade aside the high wall, it is a bit of grenade lobbying and we do it too.
This firm is pretty litigation heavy – 70% – so a lot of our trainees come here wanting to be litigators.
I enjoy winning. I’m competitive. But you should be able to use different types of approaches for cases, and need to be able to respond quickly and change the approach if a strategy isn’t working. We are very happy to park our tanks on the other side’s lawn, but we also want to be a firm that our clients enjoy working with.
The biggest influence on my life outside of the law has been my father. And within the law, the person who trained me to be a litigator – a former partner of this firm, Stephen Mayer – who was a very strong litigator with a sense of humanity and humour.
I’m very interested in art so my husband and I visit art galleries in London, and buy art when we can. We also visit art galleries abroad. My favourite artist: Renoir. RPC did have artwork in the old office and when we moved, it didn’t quite fit so we sold it and I bought three of the pieces.
My favourite book is The Catcher in the Rye. Am I allowed to say that? It went out of fashion for a long time, but it’s come back in. You have to read it at a certain age. If you don’t at the right age, you won’t get it.
We focus on areas like insurance, commercial and financial markets litigation and arbitration, and media and tech. We also do retail work and regulatory work, which are expanding areas of focus. Within the broad contentious sphere, certainly fraud features more and more, and the other major trend is there is an ever-increasing flow of work from international clients. We’ve got matters from clients in the US, Norway, Italy, Nigeria and Russia.
Group-action litigation has grown along with litigation funding. Very interesting. I’m very much in favour of there being other sources of funding for clients. RPC works very closely with funders.
There are many more lawyers in England and it’ll reach a saturation point, but new areas of work develop. The type of law we do changes. There used to be a lot of lawyers doing low-level personal injury and that’s being done increasingly less by lawyers now. Follow-on damages is a very recent evolution and inevitably as business develops and there are different ways of doing business, law will have to develop to reflect that. An obvious example is legal tech, and things like blockchain and smart contracts.
You may be paddling very hard, but above water you should never show if you’re rattled. I don’t allow myself ever to look flapped.
Tech helping to review documents has been a fantastic asset. If you have a complex case and you’re trying to look at what’s happened in the past, you can use tech to pull out a mass of emails and patterns at a very basic level – like who’s communicated with who and at what frequency – and then you can map that geographically, and that can be a clue as to what’s been going on.
I still see myself at RPC in five years’ time. As a firm we have within my practice area really stepped up the volume of litigation we have taken on and we’ve been involved in some high-profile, complex cases as a group. We are a disputes powerhouse now and I see that continuing to evolve. There will be a downturn, and we have to try and take advantage of that and use it for future growth.
I’d give my 20-year-old self the advice: ‘Don’t be scared!’
Geraldine Elliott heads the commercial litigation group at RPC.
anna.cole-bailey@legalease.co.uk