There’s still this attitude that working reduced hours means you’re not committed. For the last few years I’ve taken additional amounts of time off to fit in with my children’s school holidays. It’s something I wish I’d been brave enough to have done at a much earlier stage. I suppose I thought that showing anything which could have been perceived as weakness may have inhibited my career. But in hindsight I think I should have just said, “This is what I’m going to do. If I’m still valuable to you, great. If not, well, see you later.”

I had two children as an associate and one as an equity partner: it’s been bloody busy. What tends to go for many women when they have kids are the extra things: the lunches, the after-work marketing events, the team building weekends. It’s unfortunate as the schmoozing — for want of a better word — aspect of the job is incredibly important, especially in the run up to partnership. It sounds strange, but you’ve got to be really disciplined about it.

Studying law at Oxford was awful. I hated it. I just found it incredibly dry. However, the pressure to continue from my parents, both of whom hadn’t been to university, was sufficiently strong for me to see it through. Rather reluctantly, I then found myself joining Theodore Goddard, as it was then known. My plan was to qualify, then go off and do something more interesting. However, much to surprise, I found myself falling in love with litigation.

Basically, I was really lucky in terms of who I sat with. I got assigned to this old school fraud specialist, John Lomas, who sadly passed away two years ago. He wasn’t an easy person. In fact he was quite irascible, very much a disciple of the pre-Woolf nuclear war approach to litigation. But John was fantastic at what he did, a real strategic thinker. He inspired me to look beyond the boring stuff — of which there is a fair bit in the first few years — and engage with the tactical element of a case.

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Litigation can be extremely destructive. It’s expensive, risky, hugely time consuming and the psychological impact can be very high. On the upside, the calibre of the judges in the UK is second to none. I suppose it’s most satisfying when you’re leading somebody through the process for the first time; demystifying it, taking away the anxiety. Then, of course, you’ve got your regular stream of insurance companies and banks.

I’m all for having a split profession. I think it’s a good idea to have somebody who is one step removed come in at a later stage of a case. Of course, there are a few pompous, difficult-to-work-with barristers around. You don’t tend to use them again, though, unless it’s somebody with a really stellar reputation. It probably wouldn’t be a great career move to provide you with an example of such a person — let’s just say that as a female associate I sometimes found myself getting spoken to in a certain way by one or two members of the Bar.

I’ve recently completed an LLM in intellectual property that, unlike my undergraduate degree, was great fun. I guess it’s because this time around everything had a context. It meant a lot of sacrificed evenings and weekends, but it was worth it in the sense that it has given my practice more of an IP focus. For some reason, it all seems to involve football at the moment. The big one last year was Puma’s dispute with Nike over which brand of footwear Tomas Rosicky, the Arsenal footballer, was contracted to wear. Currently we’re assisting the FA in a dispute over the use of the 1966 World Cup mascot.

The culture at Addleshaw suits me. I especially like the fact that we have a high percentage of female partners (20 per cent), plus I get a kick out of the corporate responsibility stuff we do. It took a spell at another firm — I spent 18 months at Dewey Ballantine (now Dewey & LeBoeuf) in New York during the late nineties — in order for me to really appreciate the environment here. I don’t see myself moving again, although you can never be certain about these things.

The big four accountancy firms are our model. We’re trying to follow their lead in terms of improving our management policies, bringing in top notch non-lawyer support and basically operating much more like a business. As a member of the firm’s governance board, I think our focus on internal structures rather than expansion overseas is, touch wood, the right way to go.

Monica Burch is a partner in the litigation department at Addleshaw Goddard

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