At a City firm there is an enormous support structure around you. So it’s quite easy to find yourself sucked into a comfort zone. Getting away from that for a spell early on in my career — I spent three years as an associate at our much smaller Hong Kong office — was one of the best things I’ve ever done. I was given a lot more responsibility than I’d been used to out there, and the effect was heightened by the “tomorrow is too late” atmosphere of the place. Having survived, I came back with a sense of being robust enough to handle whatever was thrown at me.

London has got its downsides as a place to live. But it’s where the work is — and, from a legal perspective, I can’t think of a better place to have spent the last few years. The Scottish & Newcastle acquisition, in particular, stands out. God, it was challenging. The whole thing should have gone off relatively smoothly, but the bid by Carlsberg, which I represented, was leaked to the press before it had an opportunity to properly present to Scottish & Newcastle. That left our team with the rather tricky task of having to negotiate with a party that was so angry it could hardly bring itself to speak to us.

I’m allergic to authority. That’s why I decided not to join the services after university. I liked the idea of the adventure and excitement, but being given orders without justification wouldn’t have been my thing. Of course, getting ahead as a solicitor does require a degree of ability to operate in a hierarchical system. So, from that point of view, I suppose the non-compliant streak has softened a bit over the years — although it’s still very much present in my attitude to what I perceive to be unnecessary admin.

There’s clearly a bias towards the “magic circle” and major US firms. Would I like to join one? Well, I’ve never been disappointed with the quality of work that I’ve done, plus I like the people I work with, so why move? I’m not in the business of running down other organisations, but I’d question how much more some of those really big firms can actually grow.

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Life is far too short to do a job that you don’t enjoy. And anyway, you won’t succeed if you don’t have the necessary commitment to stick at it when the going gets tough. It’s what goes on underneath the rules and regulations that I find interesting — things like looking at the plans for a skyscraper that you’re helping to finance, or just dealing with interesting people. On the Trinity Mirror disposal programme last year, I somewhat bizarrely found myself negotiating with Sheikh Mohammed over the future of the Racing Post.

Essentially, I’m quite cautious. Maybe that’s why I admire businesspeople who take risks. Properly thought out, carefully analysed risks, that is. You see it in the private equity guys who bet their lives and other people’s money on something that is unpopular with the common herd, then end up with an asset that turns out to be seriously undervalued.

Sometimes you’ve got to say “no”. I’m all for being solution-oriented and trying to find a way through problems, but there are occasions when you’ve got to tell the client that what they want to do is not in compliance with the standards. Our former chairman David Lewis — now Lord Mayor of the City of London — was great at that. He never had any problems standing up to even the most senior of company chairmen and letting them know in no uncertain terms what his views were.

There’s not much I would have done differently in my career. Although I would’ve liked to have spent a few more weekends and evenings with my family, and perhaps a bit more time on the golf course. Unfortunately, the reality is that the demands of this job make it impossible to have much of a work-life balance.

I’m a glass half full kind of person. The elements that made the last couple of years extremely good from a lawyer’s point of view are still there. Looking at it internationally, corporates continue to show enthusiasm for developing their businesses and there is still a wealth of sovereign and private equity money looking for a home. That indicates to me that the medium term, if not the immediate short term, is going to be pretty positive.

Chris Pearson is a partner specialising in corporate finance at Norton Rose

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