The first sabbatical

Inspired by both the 9 weeks off and having been on that fabled treadmill of school, university and job, I decided to go back to France to carry on learning French. However, not Nice but to Brest and Biarritz and begun a love affair with France that persists to this day.

I spent 9 months in France and then 4 months in Mexico, both having the primary focus of learning French and Spanish, which I did learn to differing degrees but also a fair amount of partying and travelling. I also made friends and memories to last the ages.

Post Qualification Phase 2 – crossing the aisle

After the sabbatical I went back to private practice doing the same sort of public sector commercial work but that was no longer quite so enthralling as it had been. I then had the opportunity to move in-house and that opened my eyes. I’d always been a bit of a private practice snob thinking that in-house wasn’t better but that was ignorant of me.

That first proper in-house role lent into my experience of working around the public-private services interface. I was working in a small team, in a company that was still helmed by its founder and he had surrounded himself with top-top talent and like a sponge, I learnt as much as I could from them on how they ran a business, what was important to them and how legal advice fed into that.

The best example I can give to illustrate the latter was when I was in a board meeting, I was asked my opinion on something. I then proceeded to highlight what I didn’t know as part of the caveats but they stopped me and simple said “we know you don’t know everything but on what you do know …”  

When that company was purchased, I took the redundancy and decided to take a second sabbatical mainly because I wanted to refresh my French as I could errors were slipping in.

Sabbatical 2 – France encore, the unintended longer-term sejour

This was intended to be a short but as I’d sold my place and had no fixed abode back in UK,  it was just very easy to keep extending my stay. Then the bankers broke the world and it was just easier to stay in France. I experienced a lot – being more than a tourist, working, and of course making future life-long friends and memories.  The life is France is exceptional and even to this day I miss the constant mental challenge of speaking a second language. Nearly 3 years later, I eventually came back.

Post Qualification Phase 3

Upon my return to the UK, I did spend a bit of time back in private practice, doing commercial work but much more sale/purchase and transactional at that point. However, by the end of it, I realised that working in-house was my preference.

I then begun a sequence of in-house roles – central government, local government, international manufacturer, tech companies, are the businesses that I’ve been involved with.

Over that time, a few things became clear:

• I really like working in-house.
• I prefer working with small, medium size companies where lawyers are the first port of call for everything. Huge multinational companies are not fun at all. They pay well but usually because the lawyers are either doing one thing all the time or they tend to be administrators ie pushing requests to other lawyers to do the work. It also requires a certain level of political astuteness that simply doesn’t interest me.
• My strengths lie in the broad range of skills and experience rather than doing one area or type of work. I like the idea of somebody coming to me with anything and then trying to solve it. If I was working for a law firm, inevitably, I would end up doing the same type of work.
• I’m not somebody who likes being in a comfort zone. So, staying in one role or company is always going to be challenging even if  there is a huge amount of security with a  full-time permanent role.

This pretty much brings me to now. There is a lot more – there has to be because the above describes 30 years – but if you, the reader has seen the dry and boring Linkedin profile (and apologies, my CV has more words but is just as tedious) then hopefully, the above gives you a bit of substance to the evolution of that career.