We are now seeing a big increase in litigation for all sorts of reasons. When profits are falling, people hang on to what they’ve got because they have more time on their hands and there aren’t the deals to be done. Litigation is often used by companies as a cash flow tool to avoid paying money out. Sometimes they just litigate for longer simply to hang on to cash.

As a firm, we try to use our experience to secure resolutions that our clients are happy with and that add value to their position. If that means we make life uncomfortable for our opponents because we are one step ahead of them, so much the better. I would not call that being aggressive.

You always try to settle a case. Having said that, when one is dealing with very big, complex cases the costs, although large, are often proportionately not that great. It then becomes that much more difficult to settle, at least before getting to trial.

I don’t think anyone likes being in court, particularly a litigation solicitor. It’s a bit like being a football manager in that you pick the team and try and set the tactics, but once you’ve got there and you are on the pitch you just have to sit and watch things unfold. In one sense, you’ve lost an element of control.

I wasn’t going to be a lawyer. I had a small commercial publishing business, which I started just before my last year at university, and that was what I was going to do for a living. But I was offered an interview at Herbert Smith and thought I’d go along for the experience. I was very surprised to be offered a job. From my first week of articles, there was a huge contrast to studying law: just by practising it, the whole thing came alive and I was hooked.

The name Greeno is originally French and my ancestors were Huguenots. That’s my theory, anyway. My grandfather, Ted Greeno, was born in the East End of London and became the head of Scotland Yard CID. He ran the murder squad during the war. To the extent that I have any legal connection, it goes back to him.

The first case I worked on, 27 years ago, was an arbitration over North Sea oil prices. It lasted about eight weeks and worked wonderfully well, as arbitrations can when you have two parties who want to resolve things. I learnt a lot about how the upstream oil markets work. As new boy just out of law school, I couldn’t believe that I was working at that sort of level so soon. I was even asked by the chief executive of a major oil company if I would like a cup of coffee — quite something for someone who was only six months into articles.

One of the most interesting cases I worked on was the CATS North Sea gas pipeline litigation, one of the highest-profile “take-or-pay” cases. I learnt quite a lot about Enron in that case and I was not at all surprised what happened to them in the end. They had a way of doing business that was very different to everyone else, and which seemed to me quite reckless and arrogant. They had a practice of paying large bonuses for doing deals whether or not they turned out to be good or bad deals. If you look at a lot of the issues that came out of the Enron collapse, you could say that the lessons weren’t learnt. People were talking about problems with mark-to-market accounting and big bonuses — and now people are talking about them all over again.

I think one of the reasons the English commercial court has proved popular with companies across the world is the predictability of outcome. It is a rigorous process in which the law is certain and in which the approach of the judges is consistent. And I also think that approach results in a relatively high level of settlements.

And yet, I do think we need to look at the court rules again. There is a lot of concern about litigation getting too expensive and I think a large part of that is the introduction of case management. In commercial cases with sophisticated firms of solicitors, it creates a lot of extra work early in the case that doesn’t actually produce any real benefit.

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