Europe right now is a lot like the US in the late 1930s. In capital markets terms, anyway. The recently implemented “prospectus” and “transparency” directives —allowing issuers to do public offerings in more than one jurisdiction at the same time — are actually very similar to the US securities acts of the early part of last century. As a result, we’re facing the same challenges American attorneys had to deal with back then. How do you make new, extremely far-reaching legislation work as efficiently as possible? Figuring that out should keep us all busy for at least the next twenty years.

I loved working on Wall Street, but it had a time and a place. New York bankers tend to really whip and drive lawyers, more so than in the City. At Brown & Wood, where I started out, I was billing 2,600 hours a year and pulling regular all-nighters. Then, a pretty scary experience — I was on the 60th floor of the World Trade Center when it was attacked for the first time in 1993 — caused me to take stock and change direction.

Many people see moving in-house as a backward step. They’ve got a point. Fewer hours tends to mean less variety and more politics. Of course, there are exceptions. I’d put GE Capital, where I spent four years after the 1993 bombing, in that category. They’d sacked a Wall Street law firm in order to do all their legal work internally, while I wanted exposure to international transactions with a view to moving closer to my wife’s family in Sweden at some stage. A big part of my role at GE was overseas debt restructuring, so it worked out pretty well.

A lot of firms have gotten so large these days that by necessity they’ve had to adopt a corporate mindset. Coming from Brown & Wood, a very tight partnership where lawyers were encouraged to make decisions and be entrepreneurial, I’ve found some of the changes difficult to deal with. I had such a fun time when I came over to London after re-joining the firm in the late 90s to help build up its UK practice. Then, in 2001, we got merged with Sidley Austin. It was time to move on.

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Mistakes? I’ve certainly made a few. Several years back — just before Christmas — I mis-analysed a major point on a deal, creating a huge problem. I found the holiday period seriously hard to enjoy that year. Thankfully, after several days of rather unsuccessfully trying to conceal my angst from my wife’s parents, I came up with the perfect patch, a solution that probably ranks as my best achievement as a lawyer.

I put my career on the line going to Gide. But after my brief stint as a Sidley lawyer, I knew I needed to do something out of the box and was ready to take a gamble. It was a pretty daring project; I mean, we were establishing a brand new office and, for the first time in Gide’s history, providing advice on English and New York law. Fortunately, Merrill Lynch, who I go way back with, transferred a lot of their business to us early on. From that point, we had momentum.

At my first partnership meeting in Paris I thought the firm had gotten itself into an ugly situation where everybody was terribly upset with each other. Afterwards, while watching the partners chatting away amicably over several glasses of wine, I realised that frank debate was just part of the culture. It’s actually a beautiful thing; a reflection not only of French values, but of the fact that Gide is a lockstep partners — a total lockstep — under which even the most junior partner isn’t afraid to disagree with the senior guys.

I started running when my youngest daughter was born and I’ve never stopped. If I didn’t run, I think the stress would be very much for me, as I’m not the calmest person in the world. I’ve done twelve marathons and four ultra-marathons, most recently the Comrades race in South Africa. Finishing something like that gives you a real confidence boost: if you can survive 90km, you can handle the tough times at work.

To prosper in the current market, firms need to be diverse. Both in terms of product and geographical reach. We’ll do fine, I’m sure, as although our office here is small, we’ve got plenty of lawyers out in Asia. Obviously, the major City firms with big global networks aren’t going to be too troubled, nor are the US outfits that have made moves to expand overseas. But it’s a bad time to be a niche player.

Scott Cameron is a securities partner in the London office of Gide Loyrette Nouel, a French law firm

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