I grew up in a small town where nobody’s dad I knew worked in London. The fast train to London didn’t exist – my parents worked in local government. They’re peace campaigners and not City-type people. They have different values and so I grew up in a very different world to this. There are some benefits in having that background – it gives you a bit of perspective.
Back in those days there was very little daytime TV, so on rainy days during the summer holidays there was a programme we watched called Crown Court. They had actors dramatise a criminal trial with a real jury. It was fascinating to me and, although it’s the other branch of the profession, it really stimulated my interest in being a lawyer.
The firm has gone through several stages of evolution. I worked with John Penson, my first boss and my mentor. He was incredibly gifted and bright. He was also an eternal pessimist about deal flow; never had more than four lawyers in the team because he always thought the clients were about to disappear and the work would stop. Eventually he was convinced we should expand and we built up to a team of about 17 by 1999. That was a talented team – he insisted on high intellectual standards and I insisted on high personal skills and commercial nous. With that combination, the team created more work and more came to join us.
John was taken very ill suddenly in 1999 and died soon afterwards, leaving me with 17 orphans in a professional sense. Many of them went on to become leveraged finance partners and some became big names… professionally we survived. It was a true tragedy for his family and friends, but I gritted my teeth and kept a stiff upper lip. Seeing what happened to John… you get more perspective. A, you have more fun and, B, you learn not to stay in the office too long.
I have two daughters and they wouldn’t regard me as some sort of absentee dad. I’ve spent a lot of time working with them when they’ve needed me around for exam revision. The trick to balancing work and life is you can’t be a control freak and you have to surround yourself with very talented people, both partners and associates. It’s possible to achieve that balance – but if you don’t do this, you can’t.
Lehman changed things and by the time of the [Hogan & Hartson] merger we were mostly doing restructuring work because two or three years after 2008 there was no leveraged finance. I enjoyed that because it was challenging and you can add more as a lawyer in those situations. But the team didn’t necessarily like it – they found it unsettling and they weren’t old enough to remember a previous recession. They were used to more or less an unending period of expansion, increased profits, opportunities… they had to adapt.
Finance lawyers need to be comfortable drafting but it’s equally important that you empathise with people. We’re in the business of negotiating things, reaching agreements, making people and our clients happy. You have to see it from your client’s and the other side’s point of view simultaneously. If you’re just one dimensional, you won’t be successful.
I manage the Lloyds relationship with Emily Reid, who leads our commercial and retail banking team, and when I was interviewing for a job, she was the trainee that was brought along to talk to me about life at the firm. All this time later, we’re still good friends. I’ve got huge admiration for her. She’s been very successful in retail banking and is incredibly respected by clients. She’s decisive, knows what has to be done and she doesn’t shy away from tough decisions.
I admire Barack Obama – it’s unfashionable to be nice about politicians, especially if they’re still in office, but looking back he did amazingly well to get where he has. He was then pitched straight into the global recession. He, the US government and the British government made some very good decisions in the days immediately after Lehman. And people have since rather taken those calls for granted – it did not work out as badly as it looked like it would. As a City lawyer, you had a ringside seat when there were pretty hairy moments in 2008 and they fixed it.
Bank regulation and pressures on capital are key trends. It’s more difficult for banks to lend money basically and to fill that void we’ve got non-bank lenders who are coming to market in all spaces, be they high-yield bond financiers, debt funds, direct lenders, insurance companies… lending without the constraints banks have. That change is still rippling through markets now and that’s a challenge for us – we have to work out who the new clients are going forward and make sure we’re positioned right. But the banks will still be very important.
It will be quite difficult to do this job and stop dead. It would be nice to do something else. I come from a background that’s not exactly City and that influences my thinking. It would be nice to go and do something completely different that I thought was valuable – and away from commercial law.
I’m an Oxford United fan – they’re 91st in the Football League at the moment so it’s a labour of love. I’ve been supporting them since I was a child. You don’t really change football teams, do you?
A senior partner is no more important than a trainee or a junior lawyer. At the end of the day, we’re all professionals, we’re just at different stages of our careers. A junior trainee from firm X may be more talented than you in the long run. If you treat everyone as equally as you can, you’ll get your rewards for it.
Matthew Cottis is co-head of Hogan Lovells’ banking practice
sarah.downey@legalease.co.uk