Partner - Dispute Resolution - Nigel Rawding

Careers in Law can be very different depending on the type you practice and the size of the firm you join. Solicitors tend to be the first port of call for legal matters whether personal or corporate and they liaise with clients to try and resolve their problems or provide a legal framework for something they want to achieve.

Barristers are called in by solicitors for their expertise in a particular area of the law or to argue a case in court. That said, the distinction between the two is narrowing slightly due to the increasing scope for solicitors to conduct their own litigation.

Like many of the professions, law offers a great deal of flexibility in terms of where you practice so you don’t have to be in the centre of a large city to have a successful career. You can practice in large firms servicing business, within the businesses themselves as an in-house lawyer or at a high street practice overseeing the matters of private individuals.

It’s worth bearing in mind that the type of firm and specialty of law you practice will have a huge impact on what your daily life is like. A private equity solicitor in a magic circle firm is going to be spending a lot more time in the office than a high street solicitor. Commercial barristers were one of the biggest shocks to us. We hadn’t quite grasped just how individual the job is and the huge hours it demands. A 6 day working week appears very standard.

Law is well known as a lucrative industry and many firms seem to have coped with the credit crunch well. As a guide, if you’re a solicitor in a top 50 city firm then on your first rotation expect a salary in the £35-40,000 range. Newly qualified's will be in the sixties and three year post qualified can be anywhere from £80-110K. Salaries in the smaller high-street firms are quite a bit lower. Barristers are self-employed so their income can vary hugely but the industry stars could give David Beckham a run for his money.

Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Nigel Rawding. I am a disputes partner here at Freshfields, based in the London office of our practice.

What attracted you to this career?

I have to cast my mind back many years to a TV programme that not many of your viewers will remember called Crown Court; growing up in Manchester in the 1970’s this was a day time television programme which featured a criminal barrister who operated in the Manchester area and there was an element of theatre associated with that which seemed quite appealing and that stayed with me through the process of deciding where to go to university and what to study.

What does your job involve?

In our disputes practice we advise companies, often large international businesses, in relation to disputes that they have with their counterparts, for example we are working with one of the oil super majors at the moment, a big US-based multi-national which has got a development in Nigeria and some issues have arisen there with their contracting partner which means that there is the potential to refer that case to an international arbitration tribunal and the particular area of practice that I specialise in is in international arbitration. The way those cases are resolved is by presenting your legal arguments and evidence to a tribunal of often 3 lawyers selected by the parties, who give a decision, called an arbitration award, and decide basically who wins and who loses.

What do you do on a typical day?

It depends a little bit on the stage at which the case has reached. Quite a lot of time will be spent in meetings with the client. Quite a lot of time also will be spent in meetings with possible witnesses, people who are going to come along and give evidence in the arbitration. Those individuals might be based anywhere around the world so there is often a pretty high travel component involved in that, going to see people in their own offices rather than requiring them to come and see us. But in-between that there is lot of time spent on email, probably more than is healthy for anybody and a lot of time in internal meetings with colleagues here in the office.

Why dispute resolution?

There was an element I think of competitive instinct that might have revealed itself. As I was going through the training programme here, one sees elements of different types of practice. I started in the real estate practice, I spent some time in the corporate department of the firm, but the litigation department as we used to call ourselves, was what really captured my own imagination and there was an element of cut and thrust associated with what we do that seemed to strike a chord somewhere.

How did you choose which law firm to go to?

There was something about the idea of practising in a big city firm, which had at that stage an international component, not as much as it does now – the firm has grown internationally in a huge way since I first joined the firm – but there was something about that dimension that was interesting. If I’m honest I knew very little about the firm or other city law firms at the time I applied, but the thing that really triggered the interest for me was interviewing with three now retired partners of the firm who just seemed like very engaging individuals and it seemed to me like the sort of place that I would enjoy practicing.

What are the specialisms within your industry?

The firm is organised around a number of main practice areas and those include our corporate practice, finance, real estate, disputes which is the area where I practice, intellectual property (IP), IT.

What are the best bits about your job?

Well given the nature of the disputes practice it is a results driven business and you might expect me to say that the real satisfaction comes from winning cases and even more so if you win a case that you don’t really expect to win. That has happened a couple of times recently where the client has made no secret of the importance to him or her of winning the case and the pressure’s on and when you get that decision from the arbitration tribunal and you know you’ve won, that is a big high.

What are the worst bits about your job?

Losing which happens occasionally and is very depressing. You sometimes lose in spite of all your best efforts but sometimes that happens. There are times in-between those peaks and troughs where a lot of what we do is somewhat routine, particularly at the more junior level of preparing a case and working with documents and so forth and I think the more junior lawyers find that a bit of a grind sometimes. The other element of satisfaction though that comes through is when the client appreciates what you do. That doesn’t always happen but when it does it’s very rewarding to know that actually you have got a client, an individual or an organisation out there that’s pretty happy with what you have done.

What has been your greatest achievement?

Having stayed with the firm and become a partner in the organisation, there is a sense of personal fulfilment and achievement just associated with that and I think I’ve been very fortunate in having had opportunities to practice in other parts of the world. I’ve spent two periods of time working in our New York office and a 3 year period working in Hong Kong in the late 1980’s and those periods of time have been very interesting and very personally rewarding and has helped deliver a degree of variety over what is now quite a long career but I think making it to partner in a firm of this quality was a real achievement.

Any regrets?

I really don’t think so. I think the fact that I’ve been able to work outside of London and enjoy that amount of variety has been great. Had I not been presented with those opportunities I might have tried to agitate to get them but I don’t think there is anything fundamental that I would have done differently. I was happy with my choice of litigation as the part of the firm I wanted to practice in, I’ve been fortunate to work with some great colleagues and some very interesting clients in some pretty demanding work and it’s been mostly fun.

What is the pay like and are there any perks?

It’s pretty competitive depending on how you’re going to define the population of jobs that you’re talking about. It’s well rewarded; it’s pretty hard work as people should understand. The rewards are healthy. They don’t quite reach the scales of remuneration in the banking business but then again it’s a relatively more secure environment so you don’t get the huge bonuses at the end of the year but then again as we sit here in June 2008 bankers bonuses are not what they were 12 months ago so there isn’t quite the same volatility but it’s a very well rewarded profession and there are lots of ways in which we and other firms try to make life a bit easier for our employees knowing that they actually devote a huge amount of time to being in this organisation, such as the office restaurant and a few other things like that.

How long is a working day and do you have to work out of hours?

I don’t know whether my own working day is representative of other’s in the firm but broadly speaking I arrive at my desk somewhere between 8 and 8.30 in the morning and generally leave at about 7 in the evening with the hope of catching at least a couple of my children before they go to bed and outside of that, especially with the advent of the “Blackberry” device which now everybody keeps very close to them, there is a sense in which one is always checking, or often times out of those office hours one is checking what is going on and obviously available to clients outside of that time. Occasionally weekend work but I try to keep that under control so as not to neglect other responsibilities, if I can put it that way.

Is there much in the way of travel?

Yes, there is quite a lot of travel. It is nothing like as glamorous as one might imagine but yes, it happens quite a lot. The nature of the client base and the nature of the kind of work we do, is such that very often one is going to see the client somewhere overseas, often in the US or elsewhere in Europe.

Do you have to be based anywhere in particular?

I think the solicitor’s profession is pretty diverse in terms of the kinds of practice and kind of law firm that one might go into. Sitting here in a large city practice is not all representative of everything that a solicitor might end up doing and there will be very successful practices all around the country outside of London and even outside the bigger cities in the country who generally speaking might have a different practice mix. There might be a lot of real estate work, some criminal work, matrimonial, other smaller commercial matters and within it a high degree of variety.

What is the working environment like?

We try to encourage a reasonably informal approach to working in the office. That’s partly reflected in the fact that we do have a dress-down day on a Friday which many of us find a real challenge and would much rather be putting on a suit and a shirt, not a tie as you can see. But for client meetings generally speaking people wear a suit. That is intended I suppose to reflect a fair degree of informality in the way that people deal with each other. It’s not a hierarchical organisation, or at least I like to think it isn’t, and people do & should wander in and out of each other’s offices regardless of whether they are senior partners in the firm or more junior people and we like to encourage a collaborative approach to things. The demographics are such that statistically about half of our graduate entrants as trainees are women, we are making more efforts these days towards developing a more diverse group and that is reflected, especially in the area of practice in which I operate where I am very often working with people in offices outside of London who come from very many different backgrounds, cultures, different language abilities, legal training and so forth and that’s always fun to be exposed to that. And we do encourage people to take their work seriously but not themselves too seriously and I think we’ve succeeded to some degree in doing that.

How did you get into your job?

The frightening thing about seeing young lawyers coming into the profession these days is just how high the quality level is. I joined the firm in 1982 having studied at Cambridge University – I took the entrance papers in History to read law, got an upper 2nd degree that I think in those days was regarded as pretty much a threshold requirement. I studied then at the College of Law in Chester for a year, then took a little bit of time off before joining the firm in the early 1980’s.

What's the application process like?

We ask people to complete a written application form which has a certain amount of basic information about where they are studying, what grades they’ve got and so on, tells us a little bit about the candidate and why they see themselves pursuing a career in law with a firm like ours. We then have an interviewing process which involves a two-fold test. One is a discussion about a newspaper article that would be given to the candidate shortly before an interview and they would be asked some questions about that, really as a way of testing their analytical skills and then a more general personal interview which is designed to encourage people to reveal a bit of their personality and enable us to assess how well they might fit into the organisation here and indeed how they might fit, encouraging them to think about whether this would be the right place for them.

What are the key skills required for your job?

One of the things that’s noticeable and it becomes more noticeable is the vast amount of information that is out there and is relevant to what we do and if I think about my own practice in disputes work we are often dealing with massive amounts of documentation and other information all of which we have to assimilate, analyse and pick out from the bits that matter and are relevant and support the legal arguments that we are putting forward. So the ability to assimilate information, to analyse it and to do so in a way that that is designed to achieve a particular objective is the kind of mental approach that we are looking for and that suits some people and doesn’t suit others. There is also a sense in which we are looking for people with some real determination and drive and ambition, to really make the most of a career in an organisation like this plus interpersonal skills, some of those softer skills we regard as being very important. We like to encourage the collaborative approach I have mentioned and at the end of the day we are working for clients who are people like us who want to be able to engage with us at all sorts of different levels, so pretty well rounded people who have got that analytical ability but not just that.

What's your top tip for breaking into your industry?

It’s difficult. I don’t know whether I’ve got a complete formula. What I would encourage anybody to do is not to try to be somebody that they’re not. It’s tempting to try to develop some kind of persona that you think might be attractive to an employer but in fact it’s very easy to see through that and I think people have got to be themselves. If they’re really interested in pursuing a career in law that will come through. You’ve got to get the basics, you’ve got to get the grades, it’s a pretty challenging and competitive environment and you're going to have to work and study pretty hard. What we also see increasingly these days is people who have got genuine interests outside their studies and it’s always interesting to see people who come through who might be a concert pianists or a judo champion and that’s always quite fun to see. It’s good to see an extra dimension to people.

What's the career progress and how quickly can you move up the career ladder?

We start off with a two year training programme where people will spend a period of time being exposed to different areas of practice, very often that will include a period of secondment either in one of our overseas offices or with a client of the firm which people often very much enjoy. So after that 2 year period one would qualify into their chosen practice area, it might be the corporate part of the firm or disputes resolution which is where I practice and then begins a process which if one stays with the firm long-term culminates in being offered a partnership. There are a couple of stages that we go through. We call our newly qualified lawyers associates and after a 5 year period they would become eligible for the position of senior associate. Then one begins to think about the prospects of partnership and broadly speaking one’s looking at about a 10 year period from qualifying into the profession to making partner. There can be some variations around that but broadly speaking that’s the sort of time track. What it tends to mean is that as one gets more senior you spend less time working on the real detail of cases, not to the exclusion of knowing what’s going on but less in the way of primary drafting of documents and advice and review of underlying documentation and more at the stage of strategic planning, dealing with the senior people in the client organisation and basically managing a team of people internally that will have different elements of seniority built into it. It’s tempting to think that when you make partner you spend a lot of time on the golf course but it doesn’t really happen that way.

Where do you see the industry going?

Well, if I think about my own recent practice, I’ve seen a lot of work in the energy field and a lot of our clients are operating actively in that area. There are a lot of disputes being thrown up by consolidation in all sorts of different industries – telecoms is one where I’ve seen quite a lot of activity recently but I think one should be encouraged to keep abreast of business developments in a pretty general way. One of the things that’s worth thinking about is that when one listens to the top business stories on the radio, TV, news or in the newspapers, there will be a legal component to that somewhere and if you think about the firm’s practice from Northern Rock to Guantanamo Bay in both respects the firm is involved in advising Northern Rock, doing a lot of pro bono work in relation to Guantanamo Bay, there are legal issues out there all the time.

Is there scope for movement during or after this career?

I think it depends a little bit on the area of practice but I’ve seen many people over the years gravitate from a career in private practice but then going into industry or going into teaching or for that matter joining clients at all sorts of different levels. There’s very often an entry point in the legal function of a client but I think one can see people moving towards the business side as well. I think the legal training can equip people I think to pursue a whole series of different opportunities outside or indeed within the law.

What are the industry resources that someone interested in joining must know about?

Worth looking at the websites which are getting better and better in terms of individual firm websites, there is more information there than used to be the case. There are a number of legal periodicals, they tend to be directed more to people who are already in the profession but if one manages to get hold of a copy you can see some of the advertising there and some of the news stories about what law firms are up to but there’s a lot of information available on the internet, our own firms’ website is pretty good in terms of people thinking about applying to this firm.

If you weren't in this career, what would you be doing?

I have no idea!