Fifty one – Farringdon Legal

I sat down on the stone wall that formed the perimeter of Leicester Square. I was ridiculously early. I was so early that I had around an hour and a half to kill before I met up with my date, Isabella. Isabella was Italian. It was date date night. From what I remembered, Isabella was a language teacher; she taught both English and Italian, and I had an idea for a brilliant and interesting date; I would take her to a half-English, half-Italian comedy night.

My phone flashed, telling me that I had a new message: ‘I apologise I am afraid I won’t be able to make it this evening as I am feeling unwell. Sore throat and cold.’ Isabella’s terse message was punctuated with a number of sad face emoticons. I sent a reply back, saying it was okay; but I was grumpy. I didn’t appreciate being stood up.

After a minute of feeling sorry for myself, I pulled myself together: I now had some unexpected free time. I opened up the app and applied the ‘half hour rule’: the first event I saw at half past six was a Christmas party for lawyers.

The event was described in a mere two sentences: ‘an end of year blow out with plenty of booze and the odd Santa hat. We will also briefly look forward to the New Year and the legal opportunities and challenges for start-ups.’ The address was weird.  All I had was the name ‘Club Workspace’, a postcode and the instructions that it was ‘off Chancery Lane’. That didn’t matter. I was going.

After battling through a couple of Tube lines, I emerged from Chancery Lane underground station and started to walk towards Holborn. When I got to the first junction, I looked up to try to find a street sign. I was in the right place. Glancing down at my phone, I figured out that I had to walk half way down Chancery Lane ‘and turn left’.

‘Excuse me… Do you happen to know where Club Workspace is?’ I was standing in a cavernous reception area in a building that I had visited fifteen years earlier to meet an IT recruitment consultant. The security guard frowned. He looked over to his co-worker  ‘Club Workspace?’ he asked. His colleague slowly shook his head. I thanked them both and returned to the street.

I walked down a side street and saw light coming from an open door of what appeared to look like a shared office complex. I popped inside, asked the same question, but the guard on this second office hadn’t heard of it either. ‘Perhaps try that place at the end of the street.  You know, down there?’ gesturing roughly to where I had just come from.

I decided to give it one last try. I found a narrow path between two buildings. In the distance I saw another entrance. I stopped a man who was power-walking towards the Tube and asked him whether he had heard of the place. ‘Club Workspace? You here for the drinks?’ I nodded. ‘Head through that entrance, there’s a turning to the right, and then head down the stairs’.

‘Is this Club Workspace?’ I asked a young woman, who was standing by the entrance with a tray filled with Champagne flutes.

‘Yes, you here for the party? Would you like a glass?’ I took a glass. ‘It’s downstairs’ she smiled.

I stepped inside and walked down a spiral staircase and found myself in an area that can be best described as ‘an exclusive bar’. Fifty or sixty incandescent light bulbs dangled from a high ceiling at different heights, illuminating the area in a rich warm glow. I could see finger food.  I estimated around thirty or forty people, all smartly dressed, all chatting and laughing.

‘Hello, my name is Stephan.’ I shook an outstretched hand. Stephan was a ‘client’. I was then introduced to Nicky, who worked as a lawyer in the firm that was hosting the event. Both were keen to network. I chatted for a bit, but then went to put my bag down. By the time I had done this, the configuration of the groups had changed.

‘Hello, my name is Chris. Are you a lawyer?’ I said, clumsily introducing myself.

‘Do I look like a lawyer?’ came an abrupt challenge.

‘Well, you look very smart, so I guessed it might be a possibility.’

Shruti, it turned out, wasn’t a lawyer.  Instead, she was training to be an accountant. She didn’t have a connection with the law firm and had also found out about the event through the Meetup app. When she finished her studies, she hoped to work for a small to medium sized firm. Shruti told me that she used to teach IT in schools and had been to a number of different tech Meetup groups.

We were joined by Steve, a lawyer who worked for the firm. I asked Steve what kind of work he did, very conscious that I didn’t know anything about the Meetup I was gatecrashing, and flavour of law the company specialised in.

‘We mostly do work with start-ups. We work with web companies, financial tech companies and some crowd funding companies. You know about crowd funding? About how it works?’

After a couple of minutes chatting, I suddenly ‘got’ what Steve's job was all about.

‘So, what happens, is say there’s a couple of guys who have a good idea for a business, right?  The next thing they might do is pitch for some funding with an investor?’ Steve nodded ‘If they get that funding, what they then need to do is to have a contract drawn up between them and the people who have got the money, right?  And that’s where you come in. You help to write those contracts.’

‘You’ve got it!’ Steve smiled. I realised I had accidentally discovered another facet to the London ‘start-up landscape’ that I was accidentally uncovering.

A few minutes later, Stuart was gone, chatting to either some of his clients or some of his colleagues.

‘So, what other kind of events do you go to?’ I asked Shruti, steering our conversation in a slightly different direction: I had a question that I needed to ask.

‘Can I ask… Are you a member of The Malaysian ex-pat group?’ Shruti’s eyes widened.  ‘Have we met before?’

‘Yes! I think we did… I was there with my gym friend.’

‘Would you like any more Prosecco?’ asked a voice to my left.  Two people were doing circuits of the room, ensuring that everyone’s glass was thoroughly refreshed.

My recognition of Shruti had crept up on me.  I started to remember her when she began to talk about a ‘Fin Tech Meetup’ and the Python programming language, which was something we chatted about when we last met. A key factor that affected both our memories was that neither of us are Malaysian.

‘Thanks for coming everyone!’ I looked to where the voice was coming from.  A man was standing on a balcony.  It was Jake, the company owner ‘I hope everyone is having a good time, and by the end of the night I hope everyone is pretty trolleyed!’ Raucous laughter echoed across the walls. ‘I wanted to run this event for everyone to, well, celebrate what has been a pretty amazing year for the business. As of today, we have around five hundred clients, some of whom are celebrating with us tonight…’ Jake’s speech was short and friendly. He spoke about a magazine the business had recently published, and how things were beginning to work out. He wished us a happy Christmas. Everyone clapped. There was more drink.

I got chatting to Brian, Cythia and Moyra. Moyra had just started a new tech business which was an on-line brokerage to sell ‘events’ and ‘experiences’. I found out that she had off-shored some of her development, but was also continuing to work part time. Cynthia, it turned out, was her data manager.

Jake wandered over for a chat. I asked him about his firm. It turned out that Jake had started it three years ago, having worked at a city firm for a good few years. He looked as if he was in his mid-thirties.

‘After you’ve been doing lawyering for a while, it can go one of two ways. You either get totally sick of it and you want to do something else, or you can work on accepting that this is what you are.  I got to the point of accepting it, and realising that I’m not too bad at what I do, so I decided to try to go it alone.  If I look back to the last year, I just pinch myself; I can’t believe how far we’ve come.  We’re taking some clients off some of the really big firms, and all this is through word of mouth, by just doing things a little bit differently, partly because we can, because we’re not so big and you don’t have to justify everything in terms of revenue streams, like that magazine we produced’.

More Prosecco arrived. My glass was refreshed for the fourth time. I liked Jake, but I felt a bit uneasy in his presence, but this might have been because I was cheekily drinking quite a lot of his booze whilst knowing that I probably wouldn’t ever see him again. I think what really unnerved me was how easily he managed to charm Cythia and Moyra.

‘And then what happened was that they made me an offer, asking me whether I would like to be a partner in their firm!’

‘So, they were trying to close down the competition?’ I interjected, aware that everyone was starting to talk about a whole other world that I knew nothing about. I was beginning to feel out of my depth. I needed to show that I had some tentative idea of what was being talked about.

‘That’s it!  Exactly!’

I excused myself and made my way to the bathroom. It was then I realised that I was very drunk. I stared at myself in the mirror. I was sporting a couple of days’ growth of beard in some vain attempt to look ‘cool’, but I came to the conclusion that it wasn't working. In the cold harsh florescent light of the bathroom I saw my growing crow’s feet.

‘What on earth are you doing here?’ I asked myself. ‘I'm over forty and I'm stealing booze from a lawyer and talking nonsense to people who I have never met before’ The figure in the mirror didn’t have an answer. He just stared back at me. If truth be told, I was jealous of Jake. I was jealous that he owned his own firm, jealous of his ability to charm, jealous that he had a big party that was there to celebrate his successes. Jake, it seemed, was winning at life. Plus, in my drunken state, I was also really annoyed that he was a whole lot taller than me.

When I returned from the bathroom, I caught a glimpse of the whole room and I saw that the party was on the wane.  Shruti had left some time ago, along with about ten or fifteen other people. All that remained were the hard core drinkers. It was time for me to go.

I found Cythia and Moyra, and thanked Jake for his hospitality. I said goodbye to the enthusiastic wine waiters, and shook Stuart’s hand, whilst wishing everyone a very happy Christmas. I said goodbye to Brian, and a group of other people I hadn’t talked to, and then staggered up a spiral staircase to the street.