My CV, my Linkedin resume and even an interview can only tell you so much about the professional side of a person and you only really get to know somebody as you work with them over a period of time.

So I’m going to flesh out the context of that career to date.

In the past, I’ve generally described my career in two parts, the private practice part and the in-house part and those were more or centred around a couple of sabbaticals and that is how I’m splitting this blog idea.

Pre-training contract

To begin at the beginning – those that know, I was at Brunel University when they used to offer thin sandwich courses ie study through two terms then work over summer term and summer holiday over the first 3 years of a 4 year degree.

The first year I followed a barrister around which was really interesting – meeting a serial rapist at the Old Bailey who wanted to change his plea is an eye opening experience for a young person.

The second and third placements were in small-medium sized firms which ended really forming my experiences. In both cases, I did a lot of litigation and spent a lot of time on specific cases. As a direct result of one of these placements, I was able to accredit six months to my training contract.

Training contract

After law school, I ended up with a training contract in a what I would call a large “high street” law firm but honestly, not sure calling them “a high street firm” is right. They did do high street type work, the bulk of their work wasn’t really like that because they had contracts with local authorities and car insurance companies and incredibly broad.

I did a lot of litigation for example undertook prosecutions on behalf of local authorities, evicted people from homes and helped individuals with problems with tradesman and anything else they could have answered using legal expenses insurance.

It was a good training contract.

Post-qualification phase 1 – The beginning

After qualification, I spent a short time in the debt-collection team of a local authority where the most interesting thing was managing a couple of paralegals and refining their debt recovery approach (ie actually doing it instead of lots of letters before no-action!).

I then moved to Bristol to work at a large regional firm to be the assistant to the cleverest man I’ve ever met, in a team that had grown out of various disciplines to support a specific type of client – the NHS. I was in a team that didn’t do the big PFI projects or medical negligence but everything else. Given my litigation experience, I was there to help the clients defend judicial reviews and general advisory work.

Hand on heart, these years the most formative and I developed habits that I still use to this day, one of which was a systematic approach to understanding and implementing the law.

During this period, as a result of a team member leaving, I inherited much of his work. At that point I was already helping him do more commercial work as well as all the contentious and advisory work. That was during a time when the NHS was moving towards more contract-based arrangements. Unlike these days, virtually all the contracts had to be made from scratch especially and I learnt skills about understand and record arrangements between parties.

As I’m a restless fellow, I then moved to a team based in London to expand my experience but  where the workload was mainly commercial. That was not before having 9 weeks off which since school and university, the longest time off I’ve ever had. At the time, a New Year’s resolution meant 5 weeks in Nice, France doing a French language course. However, not a lot of French was learnt but an awful lot of time on beach and partying was undertaken. After I then headed to Australia for a 4 week trip along the well-trodden East Coast. There is an awful lot to be said for doing nothing.

The London-based firm was slog with long hours where the leaders (ie partners) … well the less said about them the better. When a friend pointed out that I was using up my youth “to work” namely very long hours followed by a lightbulb moment, I took a sabbatical.