Lunch with James Palmer is an entertaining occasion, if you’re lucky enough to
get a spot in his diary. A week in Frankfurt here, a clutch of committee
meetings there, not to mention advising the insurance giant Resolution on
its £8.6 billion merger with Friends Provident — Herbert Smith’s mergers and
acquisitions star is in constant demand. Fortunately, he had blocked out the
afternoon to write a chapter of a book on company law and is understandably
willing to avoid the task for a few more hours.
At 44, Palmer is one of the youngest of the City’s first tier of corporate
lawyers. Herbert Smith acts on fewer deals than many of its rivals but they
are regularly instructed on some of the biggest; Palmer himself has advised
the likes of Fortune Brands, Time Warner and British American Tobacco on
takeovers worth billions of pounds. It doesn’t seem to have gone to his
head. “I’m quite good at what I do,” he says. “But you come across smart
lawyers in all sorts of places. Anyone who assumes only their firm and a
small number of others have an exclusive preserve on top lawyers is naïve.”
Given his pedigree, you could be forgiven for expecting a self-satisfied bore:
Cambridge-educated, son of a former Linklaters solicitor, now an equity
partner in his own right at one of the UK’s most prestigious firms. But
Palmer, who has been married for 17 years and has three children, is
charming company—solicitous, self-effacing. He orders a glass of white wine
and barely touches it as the conversation wheels seamlessly from the
changing demographics of the British workplace to fly-fishing, his favourite
pastime.
In addition to his standing as an M&A lawyer, Palmer has in recent years
been one of the City's most visible advocates for legal reform. An
enthusiastic joiner of professional committees, he is currently head of The
Law Society and City of London Law Society joint working party on takeovers.
From 2002 to 2006, he was chairman of the City of London Law Society's
company law sub-committee. He was a vocal critic of the new Companies Act.
But his interest is far broader than just company regulation. “The real issue
is that we’ve got far too much law [in the UK],” he says. “The only people
who benefit from that is the legal profession. Absolutely nobody else.
"Some new laws have social benefits — of course. But the sheer volume of
it, and the increasing complexity of it, really only benefits lawyers. It
is, I think, a huge social cost. It’s driven by politicians feeling that if
you’re seen to create law, you’ve done something. We’ve got a problem, tell
you what — let’s make a new law!”
This leads him to a straight segue into another of his favourite subjects —
access to justice. “I think the volume of law exacerbates the remoteness of
law,” he continues. “Access to the law is a fundamental problem in the UK.
The number of people with access to legal recourse is very small and I think
that is a disgrace.
“If you had a legal problem, what’s the likelihood of you going to a lawyer,
let alone to court? Very small. Minimal.” (Palmer says he has only used a
lawyer for a personal matter twice in his life—preparing a will and
conveyancing, and he says in hindsight he could have done a better job of
the conveyancing himself.)
“That seems to me not a good state of affairs, actually, because it creates a
platform for abuse. If people feel that no-one will ever challenge them in
court, they feel that they can get away with not complying with their legal
duties.”
Doesn't that sound a bit strange coming from someone who has enjoyed a
successful career advising on enormously complicated legal issues?
“I don’t think lawyers are a world evil,” he says. “Occasionally, they do
very, very good things. I’m not saying that we don’t help companies and
that’s not a good thing—actually, we help people comply with the rules,
which is good. We’re a form of policeman; it helps clients who want to
comply with the rules to do so. But it’s an expensive cost.”
Palmer says this interest in the broader application of the law has developed
only later in his career. "I really, really find the law interesting in
a way that I didn't when I was at university and definitely didn't when I
was at law school," he says.
Although his father was a lawyer, Palmer never harboured his own idealistic
notions of the law's role in society — nor did he much care. He planned to
do something else with his life.
Palmer was born in Hertfordshire, but his parents moved to Chicago when he was
a few weeks old, when his father left Linklaters to join the newly founded
Baker & McKenzie. The family returned to the UK ten years later but his
parents soon moved again, to Hong Kong; Palmer stayed behind at a boarding
school in Winchester. He then went to Cambridge, where his ambition to study
economics was dashed by his lack of aptitude for mathematics. Law was his
fall back.
“I didn’t work very hard there at all,” he recalls. At one point he considered
giving up law to study Chinese, but he stuck with it, graduated from
Cambridge and was offered a place at Herbert Smith. Then came a year of
training at the College of Law, which he hated so much he stopped attending
lectures. Convinced he would fail, he made plans to move to Japan to teach
English. “I thought I would go off to Asia and make my fortune for an
investment bank,” he says.
Somehow, though, he made it through training and qualified with Herbert Smith
in September 1986. He became a partner in 1994 and has now been with the
firm for 21 years. (Nine of the 22 trainees who joined the firm with Palmer
are now partners, an unusually high number).
In contrast to law school, Palmer found the day to day practice of commercial
law fulfilling. “As soon as I qualified, we were the only associates on all
the deals we worked on,” he says. “Right away from qualification we were
going to board meetings, meeting with CFOs and general counsel. There was a
very high degree of high-level exposure.”
He frets that his associates today don't get the same breadth of experience as
he did. “There’s more law, more regulation, more standardisation now, which
is not always a good thing," he says. "People get less
responsibility, less quickly. That’s really bad news.”
Indeed, the firm's corporate department has been so busy in the past few
years, he says, that there is a risk of the younger lawyers becoming
overworked, disillusioned.
“We’ve got some great people who are just working their socks off at the
moment,” he says. “Are we a stress-free zone? No. A lot of people are
working hard. But hopefully you get the balance right so that people are
feeling fulfilled about what they are doing.
“I’m sure you can dig up some horror story of a Herbert Smith associate who
was treated horribly and I’m sure it’s probably true. But I would hope that
if you rung up some associates in our group you would find on the whole that
they really enjoy it. And I don’t think that’s complete naivety on my part.”
For his part, since qualifying Palmer hasn't wanted to do anything else. "I'm
very, very weird," he says. "I think I'd like to keep doing it for
a very long time. I mean minimum 60 and probably a lot older. I'd be bored
if I was 60 and I was doing nothing. And my wife would be aghast at
the thought of me hanging around the house all day."
Sirs,
Mr Palmer's point strikes a chord with me. I think we have got far too many laws in the UK and i suspect very many of them can be quite repetitive and meaning the same thing once opened to scrutiny. I am of the view that there is an intense politicisation of law making.
In the areas of the Criminal Justice System,I believe too many people are being criminalised as a result of the laws that are passed by the 'trailer loads' these days.
I appreciate the need for politicians to be seen to be tough on crime and quite rightly so. But, repetition of laws leads to confusion and uncertainity in many respect.
I think people should have more opportunity to access the law and seek justice. That will make them more fulfilled about the legal process.
Julius Ojolola, London, England