What do you do for your clients at Ignition Law?
I’m a corporate lawyer by trade, but I try to be as imaginative as possible for my clients. I like to think of our profession as one that enables people to do things, or comes up with innovative ways of getting people to where they want to be, rather than telling people things aren’t possible or can’t be done.
What gets me out of bed in the morning
Very frequently, this would be my children. In terms of motivation, I love working with interesting people on difficult problems, especially when there appears to be no clear way forward or the solution we are working towards is something that no one has tried or tested before.
An entrepreneur I admire
Aside from my wife (who set up her own business in 2017), I greatly admired my late friend Luke Holland. He and I trained together as lawyers and he made the difficult jump from law to being an entrepreneur, turning away from what might have been a simple career path in City law to joining the energetic start up scene in Berlin via an MBA at Oxford. He went on to found the company behind the Basslet (a portable, wearable subwoofer), which is now part of the Lofelt family of products. Tragically, Luke lost his life in 2015 but both he and his immense drive and enthusiasm will always be remembered by everyone who knew him.
What would you put on your Ignition Law playlist or bookshelf?
The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells, and Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall. The latter provides a fascinating insight into why the world might be as it is, and the former is nothing less than a call to arms to do everything we can not to lose it.
A social cause I care about is….
Education, particularly at the primary and pre-primary level. If we get it right then, we have a fighting chance of getting all the following steps right as well (or at least not quite as wrong).