Alex A

Profile:

I am the first and only lawyer in my family and did not really know anybody in the legal profession at the time I decided to go to law school. I would have found the initial years easier if I had been able to talk to approachable people in the profession and I might have found my long-term focus sooner.

Diversity is important to me: it brings different viewpoints and experiences to the profession and so helps to militate against potential groupthink and narrow focus; it is a small part of building a fairer society; it creates a virtuous circle in that the more people from different backgrounds are in the profession today, the more likely it is that future generations of the profession will be diverse. My family is a mix (I’m tempted to say “muddle”) of different European nationalities, cultures and religions, which is partly responsible for my strong belief in diversity.

I have been a solicitor for 19 years, with a brief stint as a litigator before that. I worked at Clifford Chance for some years before moving in-house and I worked in 3 major banks over a period of 14 years before going back into private practice at Simmons. My work as a solicitor has been in financial services. For many years I worked in corporate finance and worked on some of the biggest corporate finance transactions in the UK and internationally. Now I work as a regulatory lawyer, advising financial services institutions on how to be compliant.

The profession needs to be more diverse in every way. I hope I can contribute by helping aspiring lawyers to learn about what it is like to be a lawyer, how to navigate their way into work and helping them tackle challenges and difficulties along the way.

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