On Thirty-Eight Years

I still have the engagement letter template Edmund and I drafted by hand in 1987, before we had a letterhead to print it on. I keep it in a drawer, not on a wall — it doesn't need an audience, and neither did we, particularly, when we started this.

People sometimes ask if I imagined the firm would look like this in 2026. Honestly, no — not because I imagined something bigger, but because I didn't imagine the shape at all. We just kept doing the same handful of things well, for the same kind of client, and didn't chase what didn't fit that.

The thing I'm proudest of isn't any single case. It's that a client who instructed us in 1994 could walk into our offices today and recognise how we work, even though almost none of the people doing the work were even at the firm then. That continuity was a choice, repeatedly, not an accident.