There are not many black lawyers in the City. Still, I’ve never felt disadvantaged in any sense. Being from a middle class background, it felt normal to go off to study law and become a solicitor. However, in general terms, I can see that access to the profession is disproportionately difficult for ethnic minorities, not least because of firms’ policies of recruiting only from certain select universities. Okay, it’s not quite the old boys’ network, but it’s not all that far away.

You don’t necessarily have to qualify into a firm and stay there for the rest of your life. I started out at Clifford Chance, where I spent seven years, then did a spell as in-house counsel at UBS before moving back into private practice with Weil, Gotshal & Manges, and finally on to White & Case in 2000. The legal market has become a very dynamic place — I think most firms accept that you’ve got to grab the opportunities that come your way.

Contacts are, frankly, incredibly important. I’m not embarrassed to admit that connections helped get me the job at Weil. Maurice Allen, my old boss at Clifford Chance, had moved there to head up the banking & finance team, so I called him up and gently dropped into conversation that I was looking to move back into private practice. I suspect that who you know counts as much in law as in any other line of work.

Clifford Chance felt rather faceless. Hardly surprising, really, as it’s absolutely enormous. Once you stepped outside your subsection it could be almost overwhelming. There are 400 of us at White & Case, which, from my point of view, is a much nicer size — small enough so that you know who most people are, but sufficiently large to give the place an identity and make it feel like something more than a stereotypical overseas office of an American firm.

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To tell you the truth, there hasn’t been as much travelling in my career as I’d expected. One of the main things that attracted me to commercial law was the idea of working internationally. But it hasn’t really worked out that way. I do plenty of deals for overseas companies — I recently advised on the third largest ever Greek leveraged buyout and I’m currently acting for VA Tech on the financing of the Ilisu Dam and Hydroelectric Power Plant Project in Turkey — but the trouble is that most of our clients tend to have offices in London. And, much to my regret, I never took advantage of the opportunity to do a spell overseas as an associate.

I’m a great believer in secondments. As a lawyer you get glimpses of what goes on at the client’s end, but that’s about it. So the year I spent with Chase Manhattan as an associate proved quite an eye-opener. I saw the pressure points bankers face on a deal, got an idea of who they like to lend to, went through the internal credit processes. Suddenly everything had a context; the dots were joined up.

I’m still young enough to remember very clearly what it’s like to be an associate. And I’d hope that the resultant empathy I feel comes across in my management style, which I’d describe as fairly informal. I try not to get too hung up about lines of authority and make sure people know how their roles fit into the broader picture. I’m probably not as patient as I could be, though. I suppose it’s because I like things to be ordered, resolved. Unfortunately, deals don’t always work like that.

I’ve got two young children, so I don’t get all that much sleep, let alone time to pursue hobbies. There’s no doubt that being a mother and a partner in a City firm is a difficult balancing act to pull off. To be honest, everything else pretty much goes out of the window. I love to read, but the closest I get to it these days is wandering into a bookstore and buying a pile of books, which then invariably remain untouched on the bedside table until I go on holiday.

When I hang up my pen, I’d love to go into academia. While pondering my next move after UBS, I seriously considered doing some lecturing, or even a bit of further study, but it didn’t feel like quite the right time. Maybe in a few years I’ll do an English Literature degree, then — in an ideal world — perhaps even go on to teach it. Right now though, I’m quite happy being a lawyer.

Magdalene Bayim-Adomako is co-head of White & Case's London banking and finance practice

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