How We Think

Litigation Is a Business Decision Before It's a Legal One

Clients rarely arrive asking whether they have a good claim. They arrive asking whether pursuing it is worth what it will cost them — in management time, in counterparty relationships, in the two years it will occupy before a judgment arrives. That is a business question, and it deserves a business answer before it gets a legal one.

Litigation is a business decision wearing legal clothing. Our job is to advise on the decision, not just the clothing.

We ask about the claim's merits, certainly. But we spend at least as long asking what winning actually achieves, and whether there's a faster route to the same outcome. Sometimes the honest answer is that the claim is strong and litigation is the right tool. Often it isn't the only question worth asking first.

The firms that treat every dispute as a legal exercise tend to win cases their clients didn't need to fight. We would rather lose that kind of instruction than take it on badly advised.

The Cost of Delay in Commercial Disputes

In arbitration, delay is rarely neutral. Every month a dispute remains unresolved is a month of uncertainty priced into a counterparty relationship, a balance sheet, or a deal that's waiting to close. Clients often underestimate this because litigation cost is visible — invoices arrive monthly — while the cost of delay is invisible until it isn't.

We have seen deals collapse not because of the underlying dispute, but because the dispute was still open when financing terms needed to be agreed. The claim itself was almost incidental to the damage.

This is why we push clients, sometimes uncomfortably early, to think about resolution speed as a variable they can influence — through tribunal selection, procedural agreements, or simply being honest early about what outcome would actually be acceptable. Arbitration gives parties more control over timeline than litigation does. Few clients use that control as deliberately as they could.

Our View on Settlement

Settlement is not a consolation prize. Treated properly, it is a strategic outcome that a client's lawyers helped engineer — often the most valuable thing we do on a file, even though it produces no judgment to frame.

We have partners who have tried thirty cases and partners who have settled fifty. Neither track record is more impressive than the other; what matters is whether the outcome served the client.

The discipline is in not confusing settlement with capitulation. A well-timed settlement, informed by a clear-eyed view of the claim's real value and the client's real priorities, is a piece of legal craft. We treat it that way internally, and we'd like clients to as well.

When We Advise Clients Not to Litigate

The most valuable advice I give a client is sometimes: don't do this. Not because the claim is weak, but because litigation is the wrong tool for what they actually need.

This comes up constantly in restructuring work. A creditor with a strong claim against an insolvent counterparty may recover more, faster, and with less reputational cost through a negotiated standstill than through enforcement proceedings that yield a judgment against a company with no assets left to satisfy it.

Clients don't come to us for validation that they're right. They come for a clear view of what pursuing that rightness will actually get them. Sometimes the answer is a moral victory and a six-figure legal bill. We say so, plainly, even when it's not what the client hoped to hear.

The Difference Between Winning a Case and Solving a Problem

A client under FCA investigation doesn't want to win an argument about the regulator's process. They want the investigation to conclude, their authorisation to remain intact, and their name out of the trade press. Those are different goals, and confusing them leads to bad advice.

Having sat inside the FCA's enforcement division before joining the firm, I've seen this from both sides of the table. Firms that treat an investigation as an adversarial contest to be won often extend it. Firms that treat it as a problem to be resolved — cooperating where cooperation shortens the process, contesting only where the substance genuinely warrants it — tend to come out the other side faster and with less damage.

We advise clients on the regulatory outcome they actually need, not the argument that would feel most satisfying to make.

Why Discretion Is a Competitive Advantage

Clients tell us things they wouldn't put in an email. That only happens because they trust the conversation stays in the room — not just legally privileged, but genuinely, culturally private.

We have never issued a press release about a client matter. We do not pitch journalists case studies. When we win a significant trial, the client finds out from us before anyone else does, and often that's the only public acknowledgment the matter ever receives.

This costs us visibility. It has never cost us instructions. The clients who matter to this firm — general counsel who will still be there in ten years, deciding who to call next time — value discretion more than they value seeing our name in the press. We built the firm around that preference, not around ours.

What Clients Misunderstand About Arbitration

The most common misconception is that arbitration is simply litigation with more privacy and less formality. It isn't. The tribunal you choose, the seat you agree, and the procedural rules you adopt are all decisions that shape the outcome as much as the merits of the claim itself — and they're decisions parties often delegate too quickly.

The second misconception is that arbitration is always faster. It can be dramatically faster, or it can run longer than litigation would have, depending entirely on how the early procedural choices are made.

Clients who treat the arbitration agreement as boilerplate, settled once at the contract-drafting stage and never revisited, are often the ones surprised by how the process unfolds years later when a dispute actually arises. We try to get involved earlier than that — ideally before the contract is signed, not after the dispute begins.

Why Restraint Wins Commercial Disputes

The instinct in a serious dispute is to escalate — to file every available application, contest every procedural point, make the other side feel the cost of having started this. We understand the instinct. We rarely indulge it.

Restraint is not passivity. It is choosing which fights actually move the case forward and declining the rest, even when declining them feels, in the moment, like leaving something on the table.

Judges and tribunals notice which counsel is fighting the case and which is fighting for the sake of fighting. So do opposing counsel, when it comes time to negotiate. A reputation for restraint, earned over decades, is one of the more undervalued assets a litigation practice can have. We intend to keep it.