I think we're going to see more competition enforcement and more anticompetitive behaviour coming to light. People are using competition law to get out of contracts and there'll be more whistleblowers around. There are more people being made redundant or not getting promoted.

Companies need to take competition law seriously. Look at the fines by competition regulators against airlines for price-fixing.Many big companies have competition lawyers on their staff and competition policies in place, yet they still have a systems failure or senior people that ignore them.

Clients that are worried about being caught up in a cartel investigation shouldn't bury their head in the sand. They should investigate internally and understand that it's probably going to be somebody else's problem as well. If they're first through the door and blow the whistle on the cartel, they can escape a fine or worse.

The European Commission has been saying for years that it wants to hand over low level competition law matters to national authorities and concentrate on global cartels. That is exactly what it has done. I think these investigations that have made the headlines are definitely not the last.

Regulators are much more prepared to launch investigations than they were and many are bringing in criminal sanctions. Gordon Brown decided the only way to stop cartel behaviour was to criminalise it and make the board of directors responsible. Before this, a company might have been fined 10 per cent of its turnover. It sounds like a lot, but over ten years it could have made a lot of money out of operating a cartel. It would still get a cost benefit.

One thing I love about this job is the intellectual challenge. I'm about to appear in the European Court of Justice in a competition case that relates to copyright. It's going to set the stage for the development of law in that area and that really excites me.

I was allowed to rise very quickly to head of department at DLA Piper. Neil Gerrard and CEO Nigel Knowles have always listened to my ideas and allowed me to build the practice. I've never come up against a glass ceiling.

Building the competition and trade team is one of my most pleasing achievements. This was a saturated market and there are great teams in the City. I would say we are now in the top 10.

I was born and brought up on a travelling fairground. I used to go to school for two to three months a year and I left at 12. At 16, I lied about my age and drove heavy vehicles around the top of coalmines. During the miners' strike I couldn't get a job.

My mother and father worked extremely hard but never had a lot to show for it. The fairground business was going backwards. I got interested in the law because there were lots of licensing requirements for the fairground and there were many disputes. There was also a lot of negotiation with the local authorities.

I ended up reading law at Lancaster University. I was told I could be good as a criminal barrister but that I had no chance of being a City lawyer and I decided to prove a few people wrong.

I qualified for the New York bar in 1999. I was fed up with American lawyers telling me what European law meant.

If I wasn't working as a lawyer, I'd probably be a professional hunter. I'm about to go off to Spain to shoot Ibex (mountain goat) and Mouflon (wild sheep) and in December I'm going to hunt wild boar in Poland.

I only hunt stuff that needs to be culled and that's why I pay a fortune for my hunting trips. I often butcher the animals and keep it in the food chain. Some people who criticise me are so far away from the food chain that they think meat comes from a packet in Sainsburys.

I've never really suffered from snobbery. When I worked on the fairground, I'd always get on with the Lord of the Manor when we were working in the grounds of a stately home. The people that complain tend to be the Tesco checkout woman who marries the bank manager. It's the petty bourgeoisie and the lower middle class with aspirations that I have had problems with. I've never let that bother me.

Mike Pullen is head of the competition practice at DLA Piper

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