Eavan Saunders, the managing partner of global law firm Denton’s new Irish office, is turning clients away, for now at least. “I’d rather get rid of them for a couple of months. And keep the head down on the talent hiring,” she says. After all, why use up time and goodwill when the practice is not ready to go? 

It is still early days at the Dublin imprint and building up a practice takes time – if you want to do it right. Saunders had barely left her old job as a senior partner in William Fry when in early January word leaked out, prematurely, that Dentons had arrived on Irish soil. 

The phone started ringing. Too soon for most business. But three or four deals with an international dimension were too good to turn down.

The firm has yet to secure even a temporary Dublin office. It is looking at central locations, most likely away from the docklands hub which houses most of the big commercial practices including McCann Fitzgerald, A&L Goodbody, William Fry and Matheson. Nothing has been confirmed.

Of course with annual revenue of around $2.36 billion (2018), Dentons has the war chest to get the Irish practice up and running in its own time. Rather than arrive fully-formed like Athena from the head of Zeus, the goal is to incrementally build a full-service law firm of around 50 solicitors in three to five years with a core offering covering the corporate, banking, real estate, energy, infrastructure and technology sectors, all areas in which Saunders believes Dentons can offer global best practice.

Scaling up fast to establish dominance in a market can be a successful strategy. It is just not Dentons’ strategy. 

I meet Saunders in late February in the cafe of a Dublin hotel. She greets me with an informal ‘hi’ and sits in beside me on the couch. She is open and exuberant, talks a mile a minute and uses my name liberally throughout our conversation.

Her observations on the strengths and limitations of the Irish legal market are frank, befitting her status as an insider/outsider. While she began her career in the late 1990s with big-five law firm McCann Fitzgerald, she grew restless and moved to London where she climbed through the corporate law ranks to make partner with renowned practice Ashurst. This gives her a broad perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of the domestic legal services market.

Having children seems to have influenced her decision to move back to her native Dublin in recent years where she joined William Fry as a senior partner.

Having previously turned down big US law firms offering million-plus salaries, Dentons – the biggest of them by number of lawyers offered her a platform that was just too good to turn down.

The perfect fit

We start off our conversation talking about the battle for legal talent. Saunders says she is hoping to have around 30 legal hires in place by the end of the year, including 10 partners. 

So far so good, she tells The Currency, despite what she describes as her Groucho Marx approach to recruitment.

“I kind of want people who aren’t in the market,” she says. These are the lawyers who are doing well; the high achievers who are more than happy where they are. 

“When I was in London, I had the big American firms offer me millions, year after year.  I could have tripled my money.”

Eavan Saunders

“I’ve written a few names down on a list that I want and I’m going after these people and they’re engaging with me but that’s a slower process because you know, there’s a lot of two-way chemistry to be judged. But it’s going very well.”

Saunders is adopting a top-down recruitment strategy, targeting the blue-chip law firms first for partner-grade talent in the belief that landing some big catches early on will likely attract a better class of associate lawyer down the line.

Shane O’Donnell, former head of corporate at William Fry, was an early steal for the nascent team. It was something of a coup in what is an extremely tough recruitment market.

The growing economy has led to a surge in demand for professional services in the past few years. The big law firms are in expansionary mode and a glut of overseas players like DLA Piper, Pinsent Masons and Covington & Burling have all recently opened shop in Dublin. Legal talent is in short supply. Recruiters are on the phone daily. Poaching is rife and salaries are soaring.

I ask Saunders what she is looking for in a hire.

“You have to be up for it, for a start – at its most basic level,” she says. “Now you’d think by definition that filters itself because people who are up for it are up for it. And that’s actually not so. People think they are up for it but you can tell quite quickly, actually. It’s not the hardest thing to test, you know. They’ll ask a million questions about the platform and the clients and everything else, and they don’t want to talk about what they might bring to the table. Whereas the people that are more excited by talking about what they could do if they had the right support what opening X and Y door might mean to take their practice. You know, they’re the people that you want.”

Saunders has one big advantage in the recruitment game. There is no cap on the hiring budget. “If people are good, we’ll find room for them,” she says. Her aim is to create an A-list boutique firm that has the flexibility to pivot with the market as needed.

What she is after is hunger, along with the right cultural fit. As a professional services firm, the success of the business will stand or fall on the calibre of its people. She is acutely aware that relying on a global brand name like Dentons only takes you so far. Clients don’t care. They want good service, which they can get from Irish firms. 

Eavan Saunders (ES): In terms of the hunger, it’s people that understand that going to a client and saying we’re really big, we’re in loads of countries – that the answer to that is ‘so what’. It needs to feel different, being our client. And it needs to feel different for a whole variety of reasons. And quality is at the core of that.

Francesca Comyn (FC): Being international is not a unique position for starters. And Irish law firms have loads of international legal contacts anyway. I remember Ken Murphy of the Law Society saying when he worked at A&L Goodbody, he had, for example, Allen & Ovary (a magic circle UK law firm) lawyers on his Rolodex. They can ring any overseas firm for advice. I presume that’s true. 

Ireland is mid-market on a good day, right? That is what Ireland actually is.

ES: It’s completely true. These are good firms, and if you’re complacent about thinking ‘oh we’re international’, you’ll fail. You’ll fall flat on your face. And one of the brands I can think of have done that a bit. If you think that Ireland is some bunch of kind of semi-redneck lawyers or even semi-reasonable quality on the edge of Europe in a tiny country, and we’ll come in with our big jazz hands as an international brand and we’ll clean up,  you are doomed to fail.  The calibre of the firms is very high. Their lawyers are good, their contact list is good. Their deal sheet is really strong.  You know, these are really serious businesses, they are good professional services businesses. They can go toe-to-toe with most countries.

Why Dentons?

Eavan Saunders: ” I have to believe it before I do it. ” Photo: Bryan Meade

Saunders says she wasn’t that interested when Dentons first came knocking on her door last autumn. From her London days, she associated the firm with banking, finance and property law rather than her world of advising on M&As. Their paths didn’t cross. In Ashurst’s, she was usually dealing with some magic circle UK firm on the other side of a deal. “I didn’t even want to take the cup of coffee,” she says.

ES: I had to kick the tires a lot. I have to be a believer. I remember when I was in London and I had the big American firms offer me millions, year after year.  I could have tripled my money. And one of the reasons I didn’t take those offers then is because I didn’t think they could deliver what I could deliver for my clients where I was (in Ashurst). 

I was doing a lot of infrastructure mergers and acquisitions. I had these multiple experts across multiple sectors.  If I was doing a rail, I had a rail expert; if I was doing renewables, I had renewables; if I’d oil and gas, I’d have oil and gas. I had every form of expert. I had economists in the competition department who could help me with the modelling. And I suddenly realised I had this amazing platform to build and everybody wanted that practice. Everybody wanted me. But If I skipped off to Sullivan or Latham (US-headquartered law firms), I couldn’t replicate that. I couldn’t have looked my clients in the whites of the eyes and said ‘yeah, of course, come with me’ because I felt actually they would have been far better staying. There might have been a diminution in what I could have done for them, and the quality of expertise around me.

I have to believe it before I do it.

But a meeting with Jeremy Cohen, chief executive of Dentons for the UK and the Middle East changed her perspective. She found him to be quite a compelling person.

ES: Jeremy is understated – sort of, almost a revolutionary. If you sat here, you’d have a chat with him, you wouldn’t see that. But he has got a vision. And he has got a drive to create that, and some of the people in the global board are exactly the same. This is a firm that is going somewhere. 

And the second thing that I had to make peace with, or get my head around, is a platform that works for Ireland. Ireland is mid-market on a good day, right? That is what Ireland actually is. And if you look at the clients that I will be reaching out to here, who will be doing things in Ireland but also looking at expanding their businesses around the globe, they’ll be doing small to midsize deals in the US. They might be doing a €50 million acquisition in the US, they might be doing a €25 million acquisition or €200 million acquisitions, but they’re not going to be doing billion-euro deals as there are a very, very small handful of those in the market – and they migrate into Wall Street or into a magic circle firm in a heartbeat anyway.

“The truthful answer to the question is, it was opportunistic on Dentons’ part. Ireland has been a gap for ages.”

Eavan Saunders

So if I’m talking to a client here who wants to do something in the US, I want to be able to get them someone who will pay attention to them, that they will matter to, and I started to really think about all of that by looking at the network and looking at the expertise that’s in that building, you know. They’re (Dentons) tier one in real estate and you look at the clients in real estate and they are all people that are active here (in Ireland) already. I look at what they’re trying to do, like a Kennedy Wilson, a Hines, these are all relationships in the business already. They’re not just doing that in London, they are doing that in the Czech Republic and Eastern Europe. We’re not saying you automatically clean up because of that, you don’t, but it’s just a synergy, right. And it makes it easier. 

You know, intellectual property disputes are the same. They (Dentons) have done the biggest ever patent protection or infringement claim, in Australia, in China. There’s a guy out in Washington who’s one of the biggest names in the US. You think about people who are here in Ireland and they want strategies around IP protection. They don’t just want you to go to court for them when there’s a problem. They want you to think about that holistically, go on the front foot, how will you help them protect that IP portfolio. 

FC: Dentons isn’t the only big international firm to arrive in Dublin. Obviously there is DLA Piper and so on. There seems to be a lot of overlap in the firms piling into the market.

ES:  There’s a lot of overlap and DLA is the closest, strategy-wise, in that they want to create a full-service firm. But I think they’re going about it slightly differently. They are kind of hiring at a slightly different level. There’s probably a greater focus on getting scale fast. And as I say, I can see the wisdom with that strategy but it’s not our strategy. 

We want to be a firm of people who can offer clients those really experienced people, as well as those quite efficient juniors and those quite hungry younger partners who are very motivated to go out and build something. 

FC: Why now for Dentons in Ireland? They’re in Spain, the Netherlands, Italy.

ES: The truthful answer to the question is, it was opportunistic on Dentons’ part. Ireland has been a gap for ages. So they have an ambition – and are rolling out a strategy – to be in every country where their clients are active. So Ireland has been an obvious gap for a while. 

FC: Did Dentons consider a merger with an Irish firm (it has been common practice for the firm)?

ES: They tried that here.

FC: With a mid-level firm.

ES: Mid to big. But the revenues that they all get from referrals meant that there wasn’t a massive appetite. And also structurally, they’re not the easiest to put together either. There’s a lot of firms that have a lot of senior people at the top of equity lock steps (a remuneration system that favours seniority), you know, sitting there with another 10 years to go. And, you know, the drawbridge has come up in a lot of those firms in terms of letting people in. They’re just more mature practices.  I suppose the problem with the greenfield approach, which we’re now doing for them was, you know, it’s very rare to get a high performer out of a large firm. They don’t tend to move, right.

The biggest battle is for talent. Someone was asking me before about clients. Clients are the easy bit.

Saunders has no illusions. It’s going to cost a lot of money to get the right people in the door. However, there are cost savings from being a multinational law firm. Saunders has business development, finance and human resources infrastructures in the UK that she can tap into services that don’t have to be duplicated in Dublin.  She is hoping clients will see the benefit of that in Dentons’ billing structures.

Our talk moves to Brexit. Saunders is clear Dentons arrival in Ireland is not in any respect a hedge on the fallout from the UK’s departure from the European Union which is not to say there won’t be gains made in the Irish market.

A phenomenal advantage

FC: The government is backing the Law Society and Bar Council initiative to make Dublin a post-Brexit legal hub. Do you think that there is a lot of work to be gained from Brexit, a Brexit dividend in legal services?

ES: Yeah, I do. It’s not part of the Dentons strategy. I think some of the others who’ve got a more narrow financial services focus, it’s a defensive strategy. Quite a lot of English firms – because I have still a lot of profile with them and personal relationships in a lot of them – came and talked to me about that, but the Brexit strategy footprint in Ireland didn’t interest me. 

FC: Do you think there will be a time when contracts are more likely to be penned in Dublin, and litigated or arbitrated here?

ES: Yeah, I do buy into that. I was working at one of the investment banks a number of years back around the Brexit strategy and the pros and cons of different jurisdictions with one of the most well-known investment banks in the world. This was not long after the referendum. And one of the reasons Ireland is so attractive is because if you have an underlying matrix of English law contracts in your business, whatever it is, you can litigate them in Ireland and get the outcome as per the original intentions of the parties. So your whole operating business doesn’t need changing from your ISDA, to your more bespoke contracts.

FC: Do you think that advantage might slowly change in the next 30 years as common law diminishes in Europe?

ES: I don’t. I see it is a phenomenal advantage for Ireland. I think the Law Society and the IDA and all those people have done a fantastic job of getting out in front of that and promoting it because I think it’s real. 

A blue-blooded firm

FC: On a personal level, did you go down the UCD law route?

ES: Yeah I did. And then, you know, I left. I was two and a half years qualified. I had been in McCann’s and I left and went to London really just to get better at what I did, get a bit more experienced. 

FC: Straight into Ashurst?

“I started to work out it was a good strategy for me to take an older male partner with me sometimes when I was pitching just to kind of give you a bit of gravitas.”

Eavan Saunders

ES: Yeah. And I did a lot of work actually, which was funny because I often go with the flow. It’s only a few times in my life where I put a bit of work into a decision, and that was one of them.  And it really paid off. 

It was sort of the dot com boom times, and if you could walk and talk and you were coming from a brand like McCann’s, you’d get a job. Like I got six jobs in two days. I went to six interviews, I got six jobs. And I remember going to A&O (Allen & Overy), they were on New Change at the time, which is kind of a big terrace. And there was a wine bar at the end of the terrace. And by the time I’d hit the wine bar at the end of the terrace they’d rung to say they were offering me a job. And instead of that making me excited, it caused me to pause.

The woman who interviewed me had been up all night, her head was dropping and it just, it all felt quite frenzied. And you know, bums on seats. 

So I did quite a bit of digging around. And I remember the recruiter hadn’t put Ashurst on the list and I said I’d like to go to Ashurst. it was the sixth one I did in the two days. And look, it was an amazing firm in those days when I started. They had an amazing corporate practice. They’d more FTSE 250 clients than anybody else. You know you’re doing IPO’s one minute, takeovers the next minute, private equity the next minute. Just really diverse.

FC: How long did you spend there?

ES: 14 Years. And you know, when I was younger, every meeting I walked into, they’d say ‘wait ’til you see Eavan’. People talk about culture here. But I did work in a good culture.  Like, it was so supportive, you got talked up all the time. You got praised a lot. When clients would send an email in praising you, the senior partners would send it to everybody, send it all around to the board, and all these senior partners would come back to you and say, ‘great job Eavan, we love to see this’. There was so much of that. It was such a positive environment. 

You’d walk into meetings and sometimes it’s hard to place you. I think it happens to women more, they don’t know how senior you are. I started to work out it was a good strategy for me to take an older male partner with me sometimes when I was pitching just to kind of give you a bit of gravitas. And I don’t think I ever walked into a meeting without someone talking me up. 

FC: Were you a partner at this stage?

ES: Yeah, either a senior associate or young partner. They would say, ‘we’ve handpicked her. Wait ‘til you see her in action. She’s amazing.’ And you’d see clients respond to you differently with that kind of endorsement. So you know, I try to do that now.  You don’t always succeed. But I work pretty hard to bring out the best in them. I think praise is the biggest motivator and giving people a little room to grow. 

I think I’m pretty good too, at seeing what people’s strengths are and working to them. Like you don’t need everyone to be the same or have the same strengths. We don’t all need to be type-A personalities. I think there’s a lot of people who think that business development is type-A talkers. And it’s not. The work we do is quite hard, and it’s quite complex. And people want to work with really clever people and they want to work with decent people who care about their outcomes. And you don’t all have to be super charming, or high fiving at the rugby. I don’t believe there’s a type. but I do believe there are common denominators and there’s, you know, there’s commitment and there’s decency and there’s teamwork. 

Widening the lens

As a formative professional experience, Saunders still sees Ashurst as ‘her firm’ in many ways. But the relentlessness of London working life took its toll when she had children and she returned home to Dublin and joined William Fry as a senior corporate partner.

“It was a big sacrifice to leave in some ways. Actually. I still feel that a little bit,” she says. This seems to have played into her decision to join a big global player like Dentons.

ES: It’s lovely that the lens has got wide again, right?  It’s lovely to be able to go to clients and talk to them about what their ambitions are; raising capital in the US or, you know, managing the supply chain in Asia or, doing something out in the Middle East. And that actually happened in week one of Dentons.  

FC: Why, in William Fry, was the lens narrower?

ES: Well, it’s just, it is different. And this would be the same across all firms. It’s not really a comment on William Fry. But you might have a client who is doing one or two deals in Ireland and that’s it, they’ll never do another one. And so you can invest a lot in those relationships and it doesn’t matter.  I did a deal for Advent International that bought a business here for €450 million  a really good deal – they needed a bit of winning over. The very senior guy, an ex-Goldman guy – very demanding – was a little abrasive at the beginning. By the end, he was very effusive and said this was the best experience he’d had with a new firm. We really built up their trust but like, they’re never doing another deal in Ireland again.

That was very different for me because where I built my practice in London was on-the-job work. I didn’t talk myself into that many jobs. It was people seeing you work, and you do it again. There just isn’t the same scope to do that here. 

And that comes into fees as well. You’re not incentivized to take a longer-term view. Sometimes, you might be with a domestic client with lots of repeat work but lots of clients in Ireland are not that. And you know, you’re actually incentivized to fill your boots. Whereas at Dentons, you are really not because they’ll be doing something, somewhere else and we’d like them to be going to Dentons somewhere else. 

You know, there’s really good work in Dublin, disproportionate to the size of the economy. You’ve got the biggest corporations in the world here. And they’re active. They’re doing stuff. 

The future

FC: What are you predicting will be growth areas in law from an Irish perspective?

ES: That is a good question. You ask yourself that a lot because of the fact that all of these corporations are building quite significant in-house teams. So you have to think about it in terms of growth areas for outside law firms. I think that is where there is a lot of change, and our ability to pivot will help us.  You’ll see a shift a little bit away from transactions and more into real risk management, joined-up risk management. 

You have a lot of institutions here who are facing quite significant risks in their businesses, that they need to manage, which have a significant legal component. ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance), for example, is a classic one. Everyone’s talking about it now, but nobody really quite knows what it means. But you’re going to have to do due diligence on people’s sustainability, you’re gonna have to look at it when you’re doing an acquisition. When the money cares, everyone cares. And the money is now caring.  You have Larry Fink (billionaire CEO of BlackRock) writing to all his portfolio companies saying, unless we get comfortable that you’re ticking the Paris protocol, you’re not getting our money. And lenders are now going to start doing the same thing. 

We’re seeing people imposing standards on businesses that are not in the law. And so what people want from their law firms is an ability to look around corners and look at best practice, and again where the platform starts to make a lot of sense, because we have big public affairs people in Washington for example, and we have quite significant insight into the direction of traffic in an organisation. And I think that’s a big growth area for law firms.

FC: And they would have a good understanding of, for example, what’s being lobbied.

ES: Correct. So that’s an easy win on sustainability. You can incorporate that into your procurement but actually, you need to look at it in terms of your own building, you need to look at it in terms of the businesses that you’re buying if you’ve an M&A strategy, and you need to actually be treating it as a due diligence item that is essential. And that’s all quite new. 

If you look at the shift in legal spending in the financial institutions, it’s been a big shift from transactional work into compliance and regulation and risk management, for obvious reasons. Because they’ve just been through a torrid decade of much more active regulation, the direction of traffic is only going one way. The regulators are all under pressure to be less passive across the board from data protection to financial regulation.

 Where they have zero risk appetite is on these kinds of compliance issues and best practice issues. They don’t just want to comply with the law anymore. They want to be out ahead of it. They want to be in the best practice end of the spectrum and they need people who have that kind of that global footprint to try to get them to that place. So I think that’s a huge growth area for all the law firms – high-calibre advisory work.

A lot of the traditional contract work is getting very commoditised, and technology will have to deliver better solutions. You have to help them do that work for cheaper. 

FC: That work is being eroded?

ES: Completely. And actually, stop fighting that. Again, that’s what I like about this platform. Dentons don’t fight that anymore. We help give that work away.  Clients need you to do that commoditised stuff differently. Better, leaner, cheaper, cheaper, cheaper, even give it away to them. Give them the tools to do it themselves. And that’s what enables you to understand their business better. Build the relationship, give something back.

FC: An evolution in law towards business management and regulatory frameworks.

ES: You’re just a key risk management component for their business.

FC: Do you think the law has changed loads in your years of practice?

ES: Yeah, the regulatory environment has changed a lot and things like taxes have got very politicised. We’ve seen ethics come into capitalism. And I think that’s not going to change. I think it’s a very interesting development, and a very interesting development for lawyers. For example, there’s been some recent case law in the UK, if you put a statement into your prospectus that you know, you’re going to do a, b and c, in terms of sustainability, the courts have now said that while that might not be a statutory standard, you have made it a legally binding standard by putting that in your annual report and going out to your investors.

Those promises now have force of law, almost because the courts say ‘that’s your duty of care now, you set your own standard’. 

And you know, corporations need to know that they’re not glossies anymore. You’re getting this from drinks companies who are now sponsoring drink aware programmes. They’re quite live to it. I did work for Diageo. They’re extremely live to the fact that pushing out product at any cost, in any jurisdiction, is not going to cut it any more. Again, they need advisors that understand that, that understand where those lines are, and that can look around corners for them. So I see a big growth area in all of that. If you become kind of core to the whole brand and the whole risk management job that every board has to do, that is how you become more than an expense. 

FC: How do you negotiate the lines between an external law firm and in-house?

ES: You need to listen to them. The key to getting that right is to listen to them and ask them. It won’t be a one size fits all and you know, lawyers all have little booklets on their value-add services. And if you go and speak to general counsels (in-house lawyers), most GC’s will say they don’t add any value. So the best way to get that stuff right is to go ask.

Another thing law firms do is tell them what they already know. Going to Google and talking to them about privacy, you know, no one knows more. What you need to talk to them about is something different, and how to how to manage a situation with a regulator and how to manage a contentious situation. Get out ahead of that, you know, have a look at where there are active regulators. 

It can be embarrassing. We’ve all seen this, and it happens actually quite a lot, you’ve very high-calibre people who really know their area extremely well. And you know, you send in juniors to do due diligence who are learning as they go. Like why would a client pay an hourly rate for that? They know it better themselves.

You need to be open to giving that value away on the commoditised stuff. That’s just the way you structure deals to keep an ongoing relationship, and the door open. 

FC: Are you offering that as a point of difference?

ES: I think will be a point of difference. You’re trained in Ireland to be great legal professionals and to really know the law and people write really long emails in Ireland. In London, you get two- and three-line emails all the time with barely full sentences. It’s the same in the States. If you don’t get to the point in the first two sentences, you’re done for with a lot of clients.

“I think lawyers sit here and think ‘we’re the cleverest people in the room’. Like we know it all. “

Eavan Saunders

And a lot of clients – say a financial institution if they’re asking about compliance – want a Rolls Royce correct, super-nuanced answer to that but if an Irish PMP (project management professional) is asking a question about T’s and C’s in a commercial contract that they’re signing, they might want a view in 15 minutes on the phone that doesn’t tell them it’s doomsday. You pick the one point that you will get some movement on and tell them ‘look don’t even bother fighting this, you’re not going to get anywhere, but we know that this supplier does move on this point sometimes’.

FC: The Volvo will do just fine.

SC: Even the Golf.

Know your place

FC:  I suppose on the culture side. There used to be great pomposity attached to legal firms. Do you think that’s been broken?

ES:  Like I said, the calibre of people here is very high. What you find here, and with lawyers generally, but it’s amplified here, is we have a very inflated view of where we are in the value chain, in my opinion. This is part of the speech that my team will be getting in the office. We have clients out there, and for every single euro, every dollar, every pound they spend they’re expected to get a return on that. Every single euro or pound they give us is an expense out the door, that’s not in their core business. So unless you’re thinking all the time about your relevance to them, they’re the value creators, they’re the people operating where foreign exchange fluctuations are wiping out their margin, or where they suddenly need to outsource something to Indonesia to make sense of their manufacturing. They are navigating the most complex regulatory environment we’ve ever seen, cybersecurity dramas coming at them, right, left and centre. You name it, they’re navigating it.

And I think lawyers sit here and think ‘we’re the cleverest people in the room’. Like we know it all. We’re super important, people really should listen to us. And we’re very, I think, out of touch with where we are. And it goes way beyond being pompous. Relevance is the word that I come back to. You have to be very focused on being relevant and you’ve to put work into that. You’re not that special. You’re just another adviser and you’re money that’s not going into the core business to provide a return. So you better make damn sure that, actually, they’re comfortable that what you did helped them achieve something important for their business. 

And I remember, you were asking me about Ashurst earlier. It has a name. It was a very blue-blooded sort of firm. Slaughters (Slaughter and May) was a spin-out from Ashurst. It was quite a posh firm, full of posh guys, and I mean guys. I was the only corporate partner of 70 partners at one point, and the only female. It was very male and very posh. And I remember someone saying to my pal at the time ‘oh she’ll love Ashurst. It’s a great firm. Of course, they’ll never make her partner. She’s a lateral female so you can forget about that’. Actually, from my experience, it couldn’t have been further from the truth. London’s a massive meritocracy. Nobody cares.

FC: They can’t place you either, so whatever confines they might be operating in, you’re outside of that, I suppose.

ES: That’s so true. It was a total fascination to them that I could sit beside a lord and have a chat about Winston Churchill’s secretary’s biography or something one minute and I’d be having a chat with the taxi driver on the way home about the football and Match of the Day and be totally comfortable and totally have the chat.  They could not get their head around this. They thought this was the most extraordinary thing but every second Irish person can do that.

FC: But do you think it would have been harder if you were English though?

ES: Yeah. Back to your point, they couldn’t place me.