Lawyer Monthly Magazine - August 2019 Edition

The developer types I work with are often hugely commercial people and it is in their nature to negotiate and try to strike a deal over everything. They have little interest (quiet sensibly) in spendingany time in a courtroom trying to prove a point. I am relatively unusual in that I practice both contentious and non-contentious construction law and my job very much involves keeping clients out of formal disputes, albeit being ready for that when it is needed. In your opinion, what makes a lawyer ideal for the construction field? The ability to be highly analytical and both highly commercial at the same time. Getting any deal over the line will involve both tenacity and compromise. We have all heard the old adage “both sides thought they had a deal until they got their lawyers involved”. Lawyers can always point out no end of things that might be wrong with a deal which the clients had not thought about. However, having made the client aware of the risks, the deal still needs to get done. Why did you pick construction law? Before I studied law, I spent five years training as an architect which included spending time working in an architectural practice in Vancouver in Canada. It is testimony to how difficult it is to make a decent living in that game that a number of the more world weary architects in the office would tell me, “It’s not too late to get out of this profession...you are still young enough... you don’t have a mortgage... you don’t have a family to support... try something else”. I had a number of friends from school who had gone on to become lawyers whilst I was studying architecture and once the difference in our earning capacity became clear to me, I decided a move into law might be the better long term option. Having got into postgraduate Law College it then became apparent that I could specialise in construction law. With five I am Ian Reid, a Partner in the Construction Department at Trowers & Hamlins Solicitors LLP.I practice both contentious (front end) and non-contentious (back end) construction law. Trowers & Hamlins is an international law firm with approximately 145 partners and nearly 800 staff located across the UK, Middle East and Far East. Our headquarters is in the City of London with other offices in Birmingham, Exeter, Manchester, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Dubai, Oman and Kuala Lumpur. Trowers provides the full range of legal services and we have a particular focus on regeneration and development work. Trowers has over 50 specialist construction lawyers and is one of the UK’s leading construction practices, acting for some of the UK’s leading developers. I have worked around the world on a wide variety of construction projects including major urban regeneration schemes in London’s Docklands, city centre office blocks, luxury residential schemes, rail infrastructure projects, one of the world’s largest liquefied national gas projects, mining projects in the Australian outback, north sea oil rigs and resort developments in the South Pacific. I have organised and chaired numerous conferences on construction law both in the UK and Australia. years of architectural training behind me, I was quickly offered a training contract with a specialist construction litigation practice, at a time when some of my legal contemporaries were struggling to find work after graduation. Do you have a mantra or motto you live by when it comes to helping your clients? “Deliver”. Let’s face it, in this game if you don’t deliver you don’t have clients for very long do you? What has been your biggest achievement in the past 12 months? Working out how to persuade my eight-year-old to do his homework every day. It is pointless trying to get him to do it sitting at a table. We now recite our times tables whilst he fires penalties at me in the garden. This is much more fun... I just don't want him to still be out there knocking them past me when he is 30 years old. I want him to have moved out by then and have a place of his own. How do you go about developing innovative solutions that meet the commercial needs of the clients you work with in construction? In the development and construction industry the range of clients I deal with is extremely wide and their understanding of the contracts they are dealing with ranges from the very sophisticated, to those who have never even seen a construction contract before. Providing them with solutions is really about getting them to tell you what they really need and listening carefully to this. What they think they’ve got and what they’ve actually got or what they want and what they actually need are often very different things. I spend a lot of my time simply translating from commercial speak into legal speak and then back again. 61 AUG 2019 | WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM Professional Excellence By Ian Reid, Trowers & Hamlins LLP About Ian Reid