I used to pretend I decided to be a lawyer at 16. My sister made a visit to me in London and one of our smarter associates asked: ‘So, tell us when Phil decided to be a lawyer?’ My sister said: ‘You were eight, weren’t you?’ She blew my cover. I’ve always been attracted to it.
The most important thing I got right was choosing the firm. It was a very strong, emotional, human attachment. It was a firm you felt you could make a contribution to and not just act like a number.
Some people naturally say it’s the clients that get them out of bed. I always wonder whether they’re being truthful. The most endearing thing to focus on is the people.
The deal I remember the most was Jimmy Choo – we originally acted for one of our core clients, Phoenix Equity Partners. It was a relatively small deal, but the company was going to be run by Tamara Mellon and Robert Bensoussan. We led the legal advice on that and an acquisition on a number of later sales for Jimmy Choo. It’s a global phenomenon now and was literally a £20m deal then.
My biggest influence outside law was Louise Rogers, the chief executive of the Times Educational Supplement. Acting for Louise over the years as a female chief executive is understanding there are different ways of managing teams. The way she does it is to ensure the people around her complement what she and the team overall does. It was a real lesson in team work. It’s blindingly obvious to me that a lot of men are very poor at that. There’s a lot of machismo in leadership.
All partnerships are managed. And for classic lockstep, that’s very important. Where it looks to be under-managing, that’s very clever management on our part. We spend a lot of time talking about that.
We said years ago we were kings of the mid-market private equity – we’ve consolidated that position. There’s more for us to achieve. You see in the market day-by-day at the moment, competitors lose known private equity partners. We’ve just built and managed to remain a team. That puts us in an extremely strong position. We have the best bench of private equity lawyers in the City bar none. It’s clearly important that we keep improving.
‘One of the partners fell asleep on my shoulder and I thought “this is where I belong”.’
Corporate lawyers can cover public M&A and private equity. Adam Signy at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett covers both. He always has. I don’t think of a lot of good friends at Travers Smith as public market lawyers. It’s just the focus you choose to have.
Private equity has bred, for good and bad reasons, the cult of the individual. Fairly well known individuals are close to being bankers and hugely client-focused 24/7. A lot of that is the type of clients; we have to be able to provide that sort of service. The hesitation I have is that it’s temporary. The way you foster a longer-term people business is to focus on people of all ages and make the journey for each individual fulfilling.
The key question for us is whether the private equity landscape just becomes American. But I don’t predict that. There will always be more than enough space for high-quality UK private equity offerings. At the moment, there’s a generation of good private equity lawyers seeking solace in the dollar and taking their services to those firms. But there is a new generation at UK international firms and firms like ours.
Do you have to have US financing? It’s something we have to be wary of. We need to build and maintain relationships with US houses. We can very clearly say we have a special offering and know this market, and have been absolutely focused on this market for so long that it provides us with more advantages than some might think.
I’m less money-motivated than most.
The Magic Circle are fantastic, but I decided very early on that that was not the type of firm I wanted to be at. I remember at a drinks function, one of the partners fell asleep on my shoulder and I just thought, ‘this is where I belong’. I like to be informal and that’s much more suited to a firm like this. My wanting to make a contribution is much more akin to this sort of firm.
I have a work/life balance. We really encourage that. On a Friday evening, I coach 15 14-year-old boys in football, hopefully to another glorious victory on a Sunday morning. It puts an end to a week. It also helps me do my job.
Clients will search for true value – that doesn’t mean the cheapest, but the best price for the level of service they require. The evolution of general counsel – which has really taken place over my career – will drive that even further forward. All smart law firms are looking at what that means for them.
Law firms have gone so far pursuing profits and growth, that in some cases it has led to people forgetting that we are in the legal profession and are a people business. I would like to predict that, over the next ten years, the generation of younger lawyers will insist on a return to some of those values.
Phil Sanderson is head of private equity at Travers Smith