This always makes me feel a bit guilty because, of my friendship group at law school, I’m the only one who went the “full corporate law”. What’s your best friend from law school doing now? And help others as soon as you can the power of sponsorship can never be underestimated and can transform the careers of others. In fact, you have to – there is literally no other way because the job is too demanding for you also to be maintaining any kind of inauthenticity about who you are. You can do it on your own terms and in your own way. What advice would you give to someone who wants to get to where you are/do the job you do? I truly believe this is essential for an effective M&A lawyer, one who genuinely adds value by helping create the deal – as opposed to simply documenting it. I think about this advice a lot and it has shaped me much more widely as a lawyer: the criticality of being a proactive driver and shaper of a deal and not just a reactor and reviewer of the status quo. He was teaching me to be an active participant in shaping the narrative of the transaction, rather than simply reacting to whatever the author had put down. Tim’s advice to me seemed very simple: “Don’t open the document before you’ve written yourself a short note setting out everything you want to see in it”. When I was very junior and new to Linklaters, I had the privilege of working with one of our most legendary now retired partners, Tim Clarke, who had been involved in many if not all of the 1980s privatisations of industries of great interest to infrastructure investors today – airports, gas, electricity, telecoms, water etc. What is the wisest thing anyone ever said to you (and who said it)? I also quickly realised that I had the same responsibility to encourage forward and upwards the many talented and diverse people coming through behind me, including the talented female associates, and you can only do that if you’ve walked the walk yourself. However, I had always been encouraged to put myself forward at all stages of my career by Aedamar Comiskey, long before she became Linklaters’ senior partner. When you work alongside so many immensely talented and able practitioners, it is truly daunting to consider whether you might have something to offer as part of a leadership team. Well, leaving aside spending 27 heart-stopping minutes believing that I’d left a decoded press release for a rescue rights issue in the back of a taxi, putting myself forward for firm leadership positions has most terrified me and taken me out of my comfort zone. What is the thing in your professional career that has terrified you or taken you out of your comfort zone the most? Needless to say, I spent the slow walk back to the office coming up with some fairly creative answers to the inevitable question: “so, how did all that go?” And I still have flashbacks when confronted with a stapler. However a few kindly and more experienced fellow practitioners followed me out of the court room and explained that this judge was a particularly ill tempered individual and I was the third person that week to have made the same “egregious stapling error”. Naturally the court that day was standing room only so the humiliation was fairly complete. Things went off course fairly rapidly with said judge tearing my documents in half and extravagantly flinging them at me from the bench on the basis that they had been incorrectly stapled. I was appearing in the New South Wales District Court, having been sent there by my supervising partner to urgently file some documents with the judge. This revelation occurred during my first and only court appearance. Realising with an abrupt and undeniable jolt that I was not cut out to be a litigation lawyer. What’s your most vivid memory from being a trainee? Trained at: Minter Ellison and Herbert Smith Freehills in Sydney
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |