Warning: self-indulgent post coming up…..

30 years today I walked into the old Gray’s Inn Road offices at the now defunct law firm SJ Berwin & Co and started my legal career.? It’s been a career with more ups than downs, although that’s not to say there haven’t been times when I’ve seriously questioned my choice of career (and of course there’s been the odd digression outside private practice along the way).?

Office life was very different back then. Documents were typed on a Wang word processor, we marked agreements up by hand before sending the comments over to the other side and we didn’t have access to our own computer.? We spent hours proofreading documents rather than getting software to show the changes. You’d have to ask (at times beg) a secretary to do your typing for you and I had a boss who’d scold me for taking too long to produce documents even though it was literally impossible for me to get them turned around.? One secretary seemed to revel in the torment she caused me by refusing to help out (yes, I’m still scarred a little) whereas these days I have an amazing assistant who has worked for me for almost fifteen years.

My starting salary was approximately ￡17k (starting salary for a Dechert trainee in London nowadays is a “little bit” higher, and I'd have been shocked then if I'd known what first year US associates now get paid) and we worked extremely hard with super unsociable hours; much as our junior lawyers do now. I had some terrific bosses and some terrible ones; learning from the mistakes of the bad ones has perhaps contributed more to my appreciation of what a good leader should be than the mentoring I received from the senior lawyers who inspired me.?

I first heard the term “limited partnership” in a training session and didn’t think it was something I’d need to know anything about, before spending most of my career setting them up.? A partner once asked me to work with a client who did something called "secondaries" (‘to be honest’, he noted, ‘I’m not convinced they are really going to be a thing’) and they’ve become a significant part of my practice, including having worked on the largest ever transaction in the space.

Through luck rather than design I ended up in Singapore and this week the Asian private equity industry has converged on Singapore for a conference. The events I’ve attended and the people I’ve caught up with remind me how many friends I’ve made in the industry, how interesting, challenging and at times ground-breaking the work is, and how my enthusiasm for helping clients out has not been dimmed.

These days I take immense pleasure from seeing younger lawyers develop. I remember as a trainee disagreeing with a partner on a technical point; after he initially dismissed my views he came round to my viewpoint. I try to encourage my team to disagree with me too and sometimes (often?) they do; even at my level of seniority I feel I learn as much from them as they do from me.? I stay in touch with many of my former mentees and feel a sense of pride every time I learn of their many accomplishments, even if they now work for a competitor.? Indeed, just this week a former associate reached out to me for advice on their next career move.

Dechert is my third law firm, and the place where I have been happiest.? Our small office in Singapore has been supported from the outset, the collegiality across the firm is truly special, and nine years on from joining, somehow colleagues from around the world still seem to value my perspectives on a whole host of things (I’m sure they’ll find me out eventually….).? Our Singapore office is a wonderful place – not only do we work hard together, but we eat together, we laugh together and sometimes (okay, often) we even run together. I’ve learnt that working with great people is more important than things such as job titles, prestige, directory rankings and remuneration.

I’m lucky to love what I do, and as I walked into Dechert’s Singapore office this morning I felt the same sense of excitement that I did on my first day of work all those years ago.

I'll end with a big thank you to to everyone who has touched my career positively in some shape or form - former and current colleagues, clients, lawyers from other firms, and of course my amazing family who have tolerated my excessive travel and long work hours.

Here's to the next 30 or so years!