I have had a lifetime in the legal profession. I spent my first 10 years in the city of London with Barlow Lyde and Gilbert specialising in work for major insurance company clients.
After that I rounded off my commercial law experience working for the entertainment industry at Davenport Lyons and Company.
A period in the Spanish property market gave me a broader insight to the ways of the world before I started my own solicitors practice at Chislehurst in Kent where we prospered providing a full range of legal services.
From my five-year chairmanship of a citizen’s advice bureau, I learned that business and commerce do not mean much to the average man in the street whose life concerns are, of course, much more prosaic.
But, the time comes in everyone’s life when you weigh up your work/life balance. Taking that view from a position of working 12 hour days and managing a hard-working team of lawyers and support staff, the time inevitably comes when you have to decide whether it is all worthwhile. And doing that staring into the eyes of your American Quarter Horse, it’s not difficult to choose!
Fortunately, for me, that review came at a time when I had received a very good offer for the business and I was able to step away from it taking with me a handful of valued commercial clients.
I then enjoyed a much more specialised existence looking after the legal needs of a range of commercial clients operating in nearly all major commercial sectors. I retained my lifelong interest in insurance matters and I also represented/advised contracting clients with a variety of specialities in the construction industry. I know all about the vagaries of life in the commercial cleaning industry and have worked from one end of the supply chain industry to the other: advising freight forwarding clients as well as wholesalers of retail goods. That gives me expertise in logistics, warehousing and retail Internet fulfilment.
All these sectors of commercial life have common threads and problems ranging from premises management, employing people to work for them, contracting with suppliers and buyers and making sure they make a profit from it.
I hope on these pages to pass on some of my experience and offer my thoughts on the joys of commercial life. My American Quarter Horse gets a lot more of my attention these days but once you’ve got law in your blood, it’s hard to stop advising about it! Hopefully, visitors to these pages will find something of interest…