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Seat 3...

Ed Walshe

Dispute resolution

I spent my 3rd seat in Dispute Resolution after having done 4 months in Banking (BT6) and Corporate Finance (CFT3). The Dispute Resolution Department (DRD) was located in a separate building, this will obviously change in the move to More London, when all departments will be under one roof, but it has definitely helped DRD foster its own image and culture that provides a good addition to the firm’s overall mix.

What surprised me in DRD was the intensity of the day. From my previous seats I was used to getting busy after lunchtime and spending the morning tying up loose ends from the previous day’s work. However in DRD there was more a sense of case management, not very surprising given that the Court Procedure Rules can dictate very strict timetables. This permeates into the rest of the work that is done by DRD.

Perhaps the most telling thing I took away from my DRD seat was the change in role that a lawyer must take. Whereas in Corporate or Banking the lawyer is negotiating largely on commercial terms with the other side to reach an agreement for the deal to actually happen, in DRD something fundamental to the deal has gone wrong, that is why lawyers are involved. The lawyer must be extra sensitive therefore to the client’s needs.

The lawyer’s role is to limit the client’s exposure and potential losses. This, invariably, means that negotiations are formal and the margin for error minimal. It also showed to me how the clients really do depend on the lawyer’s intimate knowledge of the court and arbitration proceedings, unlike in other departments where the client may have been in similar commercial situations before and so is less reliant on the lawyer’s expertise. I was lucky enough to sit in on some formal out of court negotiations and found them to be a rewarding experience, not many jobs in the city allow you such high level exposure after only 8 months work.

My DRD seat helped me in my next seat as I was able to learn from DRD just how important drafting documents can be and the potential pitfalls a deal may have if the Agreement does not reflect exactly what each side is after. Some of the work done by DRD is advising the transaction lawyers in Corporate and Banking on the implications of certain clauses in their Agreements.

The intensity of the day’s work meant that working hours were quite predictable and the work/life balance was good.