Episode 01 - On Being an International Lawyer

I am writing this from an airport, as I write most things. There is a particular stillness in a departure lounge late in the evening — a few hundred people suspended between one somewhere and another — and after twenty-five years it is where I do most of my honest thinking.

People ask how you become an international lawyer, usually hoping for a route they can follow. I am always slightly embarrassed to answer, because the truth is that I did not plan it. It began, for me, in the Balkans — a piece of work I had no particular claim to, at a moment when a door happened to be open and I happened to be standing near it. Had a single thing gone differently, I expect I would have had an entirely respectable career doing something else. I say this not out of false modesty but because it is true, and because the profession does not admit it often enough: a great deal of how any of us ended up here comes down to luck, timing, and the willingness to say yes to something before you are ready.

What kept me was not the luck. That part is demanding in a way the brochures never capture. It is not really the courtroom, though there is that. It is the years. It is knowing that someone's liberty — sometimes someone's life — may rest on whether you read the one document nobody else read. It is sitting with families in the worst moment of their lives, who have decided, for reasons you never quite earn, to trust you with it. It is being a long way from your own family while you carry someone else's. My wife and I joke that I live at the airport. Like most jokes, it rests on something a little less funny.

So if you are early in this and wondering whether you belong here, I will be honest with you: much of it is chance, and none of it is glamorous. But if you find you cannot leave it alone — if the work follows you into the departure lounge at eleven at night and you are, despite everything, glad of the company — then perhaps you are in the right place after all.

More next week, conditions permitting.