Legal topics in his business and finance studies kindled Nigel’s interest in a career in law.
So, after building and selling a successful teaching firm in Hong Kong, Nigel returned to the UK to become a corporate M&A lawyer.
A fluent Japanese speaker, Nigel specialises in advising Japanese companies acquiring and investing in the UK and Europe, and onboarding Japanese clients across SE Asia though RPC's offices in Hong Kong and Singapore.
Nigel has also served as Interim GC with Japanese-owned National Car Parks, and sits as a Non-Executive Director for a UK-listed Japanese real estate business.
What do you enjoy most about working with Japanese clients?
Helping legal teams in Japanese firms bridge the cultural gap between themselves and their counterparts in other countries. There’s a very Japanese way of doing things. How businesses across Japan organise themselves, structure their hierarchies and view risk makes them different to businesses in other jurisdictions. Understanding these distinctions plays a big part in building strong relationships and securing smooth transactions.
Also, I personally have deep connections with Japanese culture. I’ve lived in Japan, my wife is Japanese and I practice kendo (a form of Japanese fencing using bamboo swords) and run a kendo club.
How did your Interim GC role at NCP come about?
NCP, one of our key clients, is owned by two Japanese companies, Park 24 and the Development Bank of Japan. I went there as maternity cover for the GC, initially for three months.
Very quickly the portfolio of departments I covered expanded to include legal, compliance, health and safety, cyber security, brand and engineering. The role was operational as well as legal and I stayed in it for seven months in total.
How did you find the switch from advising externally to being in the thick of things?
My commercial background and experience in running a business before coming into law helped. Perhaps unusually for a private practice lawyer, I primarily think on a commercial level and consider the clients’ wider business needs first, then overlay the law over that thinking.
This is a key skill for an in-house lawyer. You need to really understand the business model, the strategy and the C-suite’s approach to risk. These understandings made it easier for me to become a trusted advisor to NCP and not only a lawyer who provides legal advice.
How wide is the senior in-house lawyer’s remit?
Very. You’re expected to apply your skills to a multitude of problems, legal and otherwise. This means grasping the commercial context of every issue and project as well as the legal implications. I believe this presents one of the biggest challenges to lawyers as they become more senior.
How do in-house leadership roles differ from those in private practice?
In private practice, the aim is always to build highly educated, high performing teams that do things to a high standard and on time. In businesses, especially those that may have struggled through the pandemic or faced financial difficulties, you find operational environments with skills gaps and variations in performance levels.
This makes the job of team building and getting people to perform to a consistently high level more challenging in-house than at a law firm like RPC.
What do you believe GCs want most from their external counsel?
They want law firms that will sit alongside them and support them across all their challenges. This is a wider remit than just being on the end of the phone. Law firms need to show the in-house community that they really understand their organisation’s strategic as well as legal challenges.
Also, we need to recognise that GCs and other in-house lawyers are pressed for time as their teams, being cost centres, are quite often under-resourced. Private practice lawyers who position themselves as trusted advisers as well as great legal experts are highly valued by in-house teams.
How is AI changing the law firm/client relationship?
In-house teams are adopting AI quickly and managing risk based on the outputs it gives them. Law firms, by contrast, need to be a lot more careful about the outputs from AI.
Clients are paying for, and acting, on our advice so the detail and parameters around the information we give must be highly relevant to every client’s needs. Clients need to be careful about what they rely on as the output from large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT misses a lot of matter-specific context, which is vital in legal advice.
That said, I can see a future where disputing companies run their scenarios through a mature LLM or AI assistant, get the outcome that an expensive tribunal or court case would have delivered and look to reach a compromise knowing their opponent has exactly the same information.
How do you see the GC role changing in the next five years?
I think in-house teams will be able to cover more ground themselves thanks to AI. In turn, this will empower and free up GCs to become the trusted advisors they need to be. For those GCs who aspire to join the board of their organisations, this capability will be indispensable to their progression.
In private practice, senior lawyers often need to be seen to be operating at partner level for a couple of years before they get the promotion. The same could apply to GCs looking to be on or sitting alongside the board, so making use of newly freed-up time to develop commercial acumen is an effective way forward.
As well as kendo, how else do you switch off from work?
I love road biking. I live in Whitechapel in London during the week, but my home is just south of Birmingham. At weekends, I get to cycle through beautiful countryside, out towards places like the Cotswolds.
