Latest / Second Nature / E189 Nathan Curtis & Ben Stansfield: What Makes A Great Lawyer?

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E189 Nathan Curtis & Ben Stansfield: What Makes A Great Lawyer? · Second Nature

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: It it wasn't my list of things to discuss, but um did you see that they shortened a stage of the Tour de France for the first time ever yesterday?
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: Because the weather is that bad.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_02: So that's the new norm.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_02: Because people keep talking about it being the hottest June, July.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_02: It's not it's the coldest June or July that our kids will experience.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_02: And if you start reframing it, the hottest sounds like a freak event.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_02: It's not gonna happen again.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_02: But when it's one of the cooler Julys, it's like, okay, this is normal.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, when you're in that stage where like every year it's the hottest one.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_03: It's not in 1976.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's like the um guy who does the high jump, uh pulver, right?
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_02: And every he's the Swedish American guy.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_02: And every event he goes to he beats it by a centimetre because he's on a bonus to get.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_02: And so you think you so I have no idea what the actual limit of human expertise is in that, because he's clearly got loads more in the tank.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: So I I pick I've had this book on my bookshelf, and whenever there's a heat wave, I read a chapter of it because it's um it's called Warming Up How Climate Change is Changing Sport by Madeline Orr.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: So this is the book, I'm into it at the moment.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: So I picked it up and read it on the train again this morning, and I'm gonna write a piece on the back of this because you've got a World Cup that's now punctuated by hydration breaks that is statistically changing how the game's working because your fitness requirements are changing, because rather than it being 50 minutes unbroken, pretty much, you've now got quarters, so almost it's adopting more of an American football style time and structure and hydration like type thing.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: You've got um they'd had uh temperature stops in the US Open tennis before, where if it breaks a certain number, they're just not allowed to play.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: You've now got it hitting the Tour de France, which they almost kind of glamorise that heat in preview.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: Like it was like these guys can survive this and now being meant to be a suffer fest.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, whereas now they're open about heat injuries and things.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: And my hope is that sport is often a vehicle for people realizing things.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, look at I mean this is a delicate one to tread on, but there's an argument that South Africa apartheid ending, South Africa hosting the World Cup helped on racial grounds and issues on a rugby perspective.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe sport can be a vehicle for change for people seeing the impact of climate change here because otherwise it's just happening to other people at the other side of the world, whereas actually this brings it onto people's TV screens and into the houses.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, absolutely.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, that's quite a topical point, isn't it, given that um yesterday the government announced it was going to pass the Hillsborough legislation for account accountability in all public inquiries.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_03: Not so that's not a sport thing, that's not a sport change in law.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_03: It's a it's a change in law across the entire anyone that works in the public sector in the UK, but it's come from Hillsborough.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_03: So that that ability for sport to really make massive change is I yeah, I don't think you can underestimate it.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_03: It's huge.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: Sport and law give us a way in.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: Gentlemen, thank you for coming.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: We should probably tell people who you are and what you do.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_03: Um I'm Nath Curtis, I'm a partner at James Day, and I'm an infrastructure finance lawyer.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you very much.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm Ben Stansfield, I'm a partner at Gowling WLG, and I am a planning and environmental lawyer.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: How did you two first meet?
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_02: I remember it actually, but I don't know if you do.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_02: But I'm I feel I'm giving away too much if I if I admit that.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_02: You're gonna tell the official story or the uh Yeah.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_02: So uh so we were uh junior lawyers at Clifford Chance, one of the big firms in London, and I was doing a lot of energy consenting work.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I think you had just come back from Sao Paulo.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that would be right.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_02: And we both did a lot of work for a guy called Jeremy Cronick, who's a sort of a really impressive commercial projects guy.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_02: And I've been working with him while you're away, and then you came back and Jeremy said, Oh, you've got to go meet Nate, he's he's he's he's great, you're gonna get on like a house and fire.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_02: So we went for a coffee on the fourth floor in the yellow budgie.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_02: And was that the beginning of the beautiful relationship?
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, if only I just had a call that just went on a little bit longer, I was a bit late.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, it was good.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_03: So that'd been what 20 it was just when I got back from Sao Paulo 2006, yeah.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_03: 20 years.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_03: 20 years.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_03: So you know, that was that was kind of just when that very beginning, wasn't it, of the UK renewable energy industry.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_03: Yep.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_03: And we brought different skill sets to to those kind of deals, right?
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_03: So we ended up working working together a lot.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and they were often first, weren't they?
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_02: So sort of big uh complex offshore wind investments from overseas investors, or it was a financing that I didn't understand, but I understood the underlying assets, or it was so we did what wind, energy, waste of energy, um solar, rooftop, solar ground mounted, all those different industries, and you kind of you can see how we ended up where we did because we learned all the lessons uh back in the day.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: When did anything that might reflect natural capital first get mentioned to either of you?
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: When do you remember it being like, oh, that's getting talked about?
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I think that's a really recent development, really.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you could you could probably at a real stretch kind of think about some of the early carbon deals.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_03: I remember, I don't know whether you're involved in this, but there was a peatland restoration project in Africa.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_03: Um in tw uh that would have been 2014 or 15 or something.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think it ever actually got off the ground.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_03: Um but that was a very sort of isolated case.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_03: This as a kind of a sector, um, yeah, as an industry for me, that was it was maybe four years ago.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_02: Uh there have been threads throughout my career, so doing things like you know, protected species, some some nutrient stuff, some habitats, regs.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_02: So some of that sort of nature type improvements in restoration has been there.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_02: And yeah, some of the early emissions trading stuff where the projects were on the other side of the world and the monitoring and the land ownership and everything was all a bit uncertain.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but I think it's three to four years ago where it just exploded and became a real thing.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I think the catalyst was the BNG legislation in the environment act.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_03: Yep.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_03: For us.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_03: That was when we really started kind of doing funded structured deals that that were actually kind of a whole thing rather than sort of pockets of advisory advice.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, when before it used to be in order to get planning, what do I need to do?
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I need to do some kind of net gain, but it's all a bit uh flexible.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_02: There weren't the rules, there weren't the registers, the metrics, all that kind of stuff.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_02: It was a report written by a consultant, you get planning, great.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_02: But it it became a thing when uh Peter um Peter Backman at uh at Gresham House went into the environment bank, I think.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, I think that's right.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, in terms of the sort of the overall transaction piece, I think that was the yeah.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_02: I think I think Peter and Ruth making that big splash, it it became a real thing rather than woke sort of lefty vegan idea.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: And when when that first came into the practice, was it something you grabbed for, or was it something that was like put towards you two and you're like, we've got to deal with this now?
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: Was it a pull or a push?
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_03: What was the relationship with like I mean I I think the way you get into any new market is you follow your clients, right?
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, Ruth Murray at Gresham is someone that I've known for a very long time.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_03: She started off as a projects lawyer, she was a partner um working on projects work uh in a law firm before she joined Gresham.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_03: And um, you know, you your your clients kind of want when they're going into a new sector, they still want familiarity with their lawyers.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_03: And I think she recognized that a lot of the same principles that underpin any kind of infrastructure work are there in the natural capital sector.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_03: You know, you're talking about actually what what's the revenue, right?
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_03: How is that structured?
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_03: How can I kind of use that to underpin the capital that I'm putting into the top of the project?
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_03: How do I go about designing my contracts?
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_03: You know, so whether whether it's my lease or my land management agreement or my route to market for the credits, how do we make those contracts look normal from the perspective of stuff that people have banked in other sectors before?
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so so I think yeah, a big part of it was actually clients coming to us and saying, we really like the work that you've done in other sectors.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_03: You've kind of proven yourself there.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_03: Um, let's work on this thing together.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_03: And we know there's no handle you can crank to you know spew out the same documents you did last week.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_03: This is going to be bespoke stuff, this is gonna need innovation and some kind of intellectual IP going into it.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but we'll work it out together, and I think that's that's kind of really where it came from.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: Because four years ago there was nothing, right?
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah when when it landed, there were no contracts, there were no documents, you had to build everything from scratch.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, the first thing that we did, I mean, the the the BNG legislation and the Environment Act was still a bill at the time, right?
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_03: It hadn't been enacted.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_03: So the first thing we did was was say to ourselves, um, what's the sort of fundamental underpinning this?
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_03: And we had to go and kind of look up the the the bill as it was at the at the time because it wasn't something that we'd heard people really talking about from a investment perspective.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_03: Um so we really were kind of starting from scratch.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_02: Create sort of framework, doesn't it?
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't give you any of the back-end stuff of how you go to market and what the sales contracts look like, what the finance stuff looks like.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_02: And I I remember, you know, the early meetings were, you know, you had a finance lawyer, a commercial lawyer, a real estate lawyer, me on the sort of regulatory type side, and understanding how it looked at the back end in terms of what developers needed to get, and it was just working out who the parties were and where the arrows between the different people were, and there was no responsible bodies.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_02: And did anyone was anyone going to step forward and become a responsible body and all these kind of variables?
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um but this is the thing, isn't it, right?
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_03: Like this is what we've done our whole careers.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_03: When we started off doing, you know, we did the first round three offshore wind farm to be project financed, right?
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_03: Which was a bit a big project off the east coast of England called Gallop.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_03: Nobody'd financed an offshore wind project before, and a lot of the principles for that actually kind of slightly bizarrely or counterintuitively at least were sort of borrowed from the finance work we'd done in oil and gas.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_03: And then when we were spinning that offshore wind experience into battery storage, for example, no one had done battery storage, and again, you're sort of taking the principles from something else and you're applying them to the new thing in front of you with the right adjustments to make it work because all these things are different, but they have some of the same principles underlying them.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_03: And exactly the same with with nature, right?
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_03: We took the principles that we'd learned on some of these um earlier projects, tweaked them for the sector.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_03: Tweak is probably slightly underplaying it, but you know what I mean, um, and solved for that new thing, but adopting principles that are long established in these markets.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_02: Which is why I mean we know that the B and G legislation's been constantly tinkered with, and I I'm not relaxed about it, but we saw that with offshore wind.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_02: We saw that I remember you know German investors buying into uh an offshore wind farm, and the government were constantly tweaking the rock awards.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, you uh the suppliers were under an obligation to buy renewable obligation certificates, generators could create these rocks, um, and it was one rock per megawatt, and then offshore wind became sort of 1.5, or if you put some online, it became two.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_02: And the conversations we were constantly having with clients about this is the rock, or this is how yes, there's all sorts of regulatory uncertainty, but these are the principles as to how English law deals with projects and finance and non-retroactivity of legislation.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um and you see it again, and I'm fine with it because it means that there's all this tinkering and fine-tuning, because it means that you can go from one or two wind turbines in the sea to 3,000.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_02: And if you don't tweak the legislation, the investors, the funders don't come.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_02: So all that, I think if you if you're involved in offshore wind, you see nature and natural capital in a different way.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: What are the what are the reasons why that was continuously tweed?
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: What were the drivers that was making government and uh the civil service adjust those things?
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_02: So when it was one rot per megawatt, that just wasn't enough to cover the cost.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't enough to get the investors and the financiers involved.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and then when it became oversubsidized, you've got to adjust it back down so that the return looks sensible and then you're not gifting uh an industry way too much subsidy.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_02: I mean and and you saw it even more obviously with uh rooftop solarite, where it just exploded and it went the you know, the feed-in tariffs went from a ridiculously high number, but necessary to get it going, and then sort of fell off the cliff.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: That was something that came up so often in London Climate Week this year.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: All the conversation had been about regulation being stopping people to do things, and it had probably been 18 months since I'd heard anyone talk about potentially throwing a carrot into the mix rather than just a stick.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: And it was Martin Berg at an event we did, he's like, if the government wants this to go faster, they could just incentivize it a little bit more.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, Oh yeah, I forgot they had that tool at their disposal as well.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they could ramp up, they could subsidize, they could make it easier for people to pay for carbon credits or nature credits or whatever they wanted to do if they wanted that to be a thing.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: So you forget there are two sides to the regulation equation.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_03: We're seeing that, aren't we, with uh sustainable aviation fuel, right?
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_03: Where the debate is, do you mandate the airlines to have to start switching to SAF or do you incentivize them through your subsidy?
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_03: Or actually do you do both?
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and with you know with BNG, it's uh it's a mandatory compliance regime, right?
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_03: Actually, the onus is on developers, yeah, in order to get planning to to evidence that they've invested in in biodiversity, you know, in rewilding, whatever whatever you want to call it.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_01: And there is just on that though, it was your point earlier.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: Every senior development, so every C-suite person I spoke to, uh a house developer specifically, they're like, oh no no, we like BNG because people forget what they were faced with before was they had to do something, no one would tell them what it was.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: It would be different in every geography, in every local authority.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_01: So they couldn't even plan for it or model it.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: Now they know they know what that cost is going to be, and actually, where they do it well.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_01: So Neil um at Bellway Homes speaks about this beautifully.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_01: Where we do this well, it helps us sell houses.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: People want to buy houses in a place that functions better, looks better, is a better environment.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: So actually, people often think the developers don't want it.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: Broadly, they're happy with it, they just like some certainty of the requirements.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_03: And maybe, yeah, and and maybe that's a slightly unintentional effect of the legislation.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_03: Who who knows?
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_03: But but but I think to your point around actually the fastest way to grow a market is to subsidize it is an interesting one.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_03: That definitely is what happened with with renewable energy.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_03: But but actually, you know, a certain way into the kind of development curve of that industry, we switched from a pure subsidy under the ROC regime to uh you know to a contract for difference where which is like a hedge, right?
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_03: So actually, if you're a renewable energy developer and you make too much money, you have to start paying that back to government.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_03: So something structured along those lines for nature, where you're giving the market certainty as to the kind of baseline pricing, but you're also saying to the market, if you get a windfall from this, actually you've got to start paying some of that back.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_03: So there's kind of a fair allocation of risk and reward as between the public and private sectors.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_03: That's you know, that's a proven mechanism that that's investable.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that's something that you know if if this were high enough up, the government agenda would be something really worth looking at.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_02: So if you're a nature minister, that's the new regime.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, like I'm just making the point that that's a proven way of yeah, you could do you could do that.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_03: It does.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_03: I I just I'm just saying I entirely agree with the point that compulsion is not the only tool.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, we talk we talked last week a lot about different kinds of kind of government intervention that you could have around some of this stuff.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_03: And we do need to remember that compulsion is not the only tool that that that some sort of incentive is is also you know available as well, alongside of other things too.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_02: I think about the sort of speed of nature rollout, and you because you see it with AI, and I think nature and AI have got all sorts of interesting parallels, right?
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_02: And you see AI just going crazy fast, and people go, ooh, slow, you know, is this is this overtaking us?
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_02: Do we need to slow down?
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_02: Is this causing a risk?
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_02: But if you speed up nature, what's the worst that happens?
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, yeah, it it it it it it feels like you know, if you speed up nature, you get redemption.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_02: If you if you speed up AI, you get risk.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_03: So yeah, the more you speed up AI, the more you need to speed up nature, right?
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_03: To offset all the damage that you're causing.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_03: So um, yeah, no, I think there's definitely something in that.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: You've you've taken us there.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um, how would you articulate your position on the spectrum between being AI optimists and pessimists in terms of the whole thing AIs bring into the world?
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_02: I I think I'm I'm too old and too unqualified to know.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_02: So I use AI quite a bit, but I probably I don't scratch the surface of it.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: I bring that to life for people.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: What do you mean when you say you use it quite a bit?
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_02: So I will use Copilot to scrape through my 20,000 emails in the inbox and put together my s my schedules when I'm traveling and meetings and what have you.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_02: I use uh other AI tools to and actually and actually biodiversity net game is a really good example.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_02: We have 10 habitat banks we deal with a lot.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_02: We know what we're doing with those, but you still get a habitat bank with a contract you've never seen before because it's a a landowner going into the first time.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_02: So you've got a nice little vault with your 10 contracts you're very happy with, and you throw the new one in and say, How does this stack up against the others?
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_02: and you get a pretty good first draft terms of issues list, which you can talk to your clients about.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_02: So you can speed up the basic stuff.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sure it can do way more.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sure Nate's uh a genius at it being younger and cooler than me, but I'm not gonna argue with that.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_02: I am younger and cooler.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_01: How how much is it impacting your day-to-day?
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_03: So look, you got I think we need to be as a profession, right?
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_03: If we're just talking narrowly about AI in the legal profession, we need we need to be quite careful.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_03: If the legal market's view of AI is this is great because it's gonna save me money, that's the wrong perspective.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_03: The right perspective is this is great because it enables us to provide a better service to our clients in a more efficient way.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_03: And thinking about it through the lens of how do we use this to be better, to be more skilled, to be more professional, to offer more, rather than how do we use this to save lawyer time?
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, no, totally.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_02: But and the best lawyers are bumblebees, right?
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_02: So an in-house lawyer is a bumblebee because they go from sales to accounts to the supply chains, the CEO.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_02: They're constantly going around the business, gathering information and passing it on.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_02: And the best lawyers in private practice are bumblebees because we go from sector to sector as we've done with nature and in renewables, and taking the structures and the best bit or the best practice and and bringing it into a new sector.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't think AI can do that.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_02: I think the the the the beauty of of you know good legal service is that human touch, right?
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_03: At the moment it doesn't it doesn't understand nuance.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_03: And a huge part of what we do is nuance and subtlety.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I mean, you know, you're you're a client, I'm not, but my um expectation is you want to hear, yeah, Rich, this is the right thing to do from a human who's seen it before and done it before, not just a computer saying unbalanced probabilities or based on something I've read on the internet, that's probably fine.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_02: So I think I think that human analysis, that sort of metaphorical hand holding and saying, Yeah, no, this this this is the way forward.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_02: I d I don't think that gets lost.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_02: But I guess the opportunities for junior always are going to be smaller, thinner.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: Is that real or is that a fear?
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: Like have you seen that yet, that it is affecting the number of junior opportunities, or is that a narrative?
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_02: I've not seen it yet, but it feels like it could be credible.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, in the professional services sector more widely, it it's definitely real.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_03: Like you're seeing I I I don't know whether it's all of the big four, but certainly some of them have really scaled back graduate recruitment.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_03: And why is that a problem?
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_03: Because the senior people of tomorrow are the graduate recruitees of today.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: They right.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_03: So the fewer graduates you're putting into the system, the less chance you're going to have of really high-quality leaders being there in 10, 15 years' time.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_03: So that does worry me a bit.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_02: You're right.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_02: But then if you think back to when we were junior lawyers, the senior people then, who've now retired, grew up doing leases, licenses, more less sophisticated stuff.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_02: And they they developed from that into something pretty amazing.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_02: We learnt from them and we kind of went in at quite complex work.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um and similarly have developed into something pretty amazing in your case.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_02: And this is unusual.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_02: Is this a Tracy Style episode?
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_03: Put a TV camera on him and he suddenly misses chart.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_03: I'm trying to be humble.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_02: But you have to assume that the junior lawyers of today and tomorrow will be similarly equipped to sort of make their mark.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, yeah, there might not be as many, but I I don't think AI prevents them developing into phenomenal lawyers.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_03: I think the thing is that it's the law firms that are gonna own the AI, right?
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_03: Not the clients.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_03: And yeah, what do I mean by that?
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_03: Why do people why did why do we not do our own conveyancing, right, when we buy a house?
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_03: One, we'd be terrible at it, but two, ultimately you need to have someone to sue, right?
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_03: You're not gonna sue Chat GPT if it gets it wrong.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_01: So so I was I was very fortunate to be at an event um top of Salesforce Tower in San Francisco Climate Week, and Anthropic were hosting a head of US for Anthropic was hosting like a masterclass with Salesforce 20 startups for this year, undles.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: We we were just there as guests, it it was amazing.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: And and they were talking about how one of the narratives was uh all these pop-up AI-led law firms are gonna be bad for the number of lawyers.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: And that I think I think they quoted the head of uh the head legal professor at like Berkeley at Cal saying, no, no, this will be the biggest growth in lawyers we've ever seen because the amount of bad legal paperwork that'll be out there now, there there is like an unlimited printing press for bad legal advice.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_01: Someone's gonna have to clean up the mess.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: And he's like, it's the greatest thing that could happen for lawyers ever.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: And the whole room went, oh yeah, that realization of that secondary order impact of it.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_03: There was a I think a professor of economics at Cambridge, he was talking on a course I was at recently, and he was saying something similar.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_03: He was also saying that if it slightly brings down that sort of barrier to entry to professional legal services, all it's gonna do is grow the market because suddenly, you know, more companies, more people will be able to actually access um you know kind of higher-end legal services, it's just gonna grow the market.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I had a qu a client ask me a couple of weeks ago actually, look, you know, if we if we got some legal tools, could we start using it?
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_02: Would it help you if we did a first draft of the contract that we want to enter into?
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, it it really wouldn't.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_02: But if you used your heads of terms and put that in and you know, flesh out your heads of terms with some different ideas, that would be useful.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_02: You know, give the more the better the input, the better we'll be able to craft something in terms of the contract and and understand what market looks like, what does the other side's gonna want, all that kind of stuff.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_02: So spend time thinking about your ideas and and and what structures you might want and what remedies and liabilities, but uh and make sure that's full rather than just two three points on the back of a fact packet.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: When when you both were junior lawyers and you first met, was it always in your mind I want to be a partner at some point?
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_01: And is that true of every junior lawyer when they come in, they're like, that's where I want to get to?
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_03: I I think um that's that's probably true of the majority of people that started in this profession when we did.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_03: Most people felt like they were in for the long haul and behaved accordingly.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_03: I think these days people are a bit more flexible in their mindsets about what they want to do.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_03: I don't see that kind of um that I have to be a partner ambition as often now, I don't think, as I used to.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know, no, I think and I think it's a longer journey, right?
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_02: For sure.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_02: It's yeah, you know, harder 20 odd years ago, it was yeah, I got made up at nine years, nine and a half.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um that would be quite early now.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think What would your expectation be at the time when you came in?
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: Were you thinking this is a nine, ten-year thing?
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_02: So I I worked with uh a guy called Nigel Howard, he's now Global Head of Environment CC, uh, and I think he did it seven, seven and a half.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_02: I mean he he was brilliant, um but I think that seven to eight was the the norm, so I thought maybe that plus a bit extra.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_03: I think when we were kind of mid-level lawyers, it felt like that timetable was getting pushback a year every two years or or something like that.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_03: It always did seem to be getting stretched.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_02: And I think you know, one of my faults was I didn't enjoy the journey enough because you're like, that's the goal, that's where I want to keep going.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_02: And I think people these days are a little bit more like, well, I'd like it to happen.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_02: It i i i on my terms.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um and in the meantime, I'm just gonna focus on doing really interesting stuff for the right clients, really understanding a sector.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um so when you entered, what did you think it would take to get to partner level?
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: And what did you realise it did take?
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_02: See, I think I had it easier than a transactional guy, right?
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_02: Because I would work regularly till sort of eight or nine.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_02: I do one late night a week till midnight or one, two, to get all my admin done and catch up on the loose ends.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_02: It never worked Saturday.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_02: Very rarely will work Saturday, didn't really work Sundays, and I turned my computer on at six, and I I've kept that going.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_02: So I don't think I would have made the sacrifices that an MA lawyer or a finance lawyer would have been up against because my bit on nay steals would probably be a bit more on the structuring.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_02: This is how the regulation works, here's my schedule, here's my two or three key clauses, and then they'd be in the meeting rooms till six a.m.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_02: doing the dish.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_01: So even under your context, that's a 60-hour week?
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's probably a little bit more than that.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, for a decade.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: And and your definition of that is you had it easy.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's but like are you.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think your profession talks about it anywhere near enough.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_01: So prior to this chapter at OC and literally seeing how you guys work.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: So so we were uh we were in a uh Clifford Chancellor's offices for our book launch.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks very much, appreciate you.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we finished up that book launch like nine o'clock at night, and the food was arriving for the lawyers who weren't leaving until midnight.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think people who don't work with city law firms have any comprehension that that's what's required.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_03: Um what was what was your yeah and and look, you know working at Clifford Chance and spending all those years there were was incredible, right, for our careers.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_03: Um and we had it really was I mean, this is a massive cliche, but it really was that sort of work hard, play hard type culture.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but the opportunities we had to go and work in other jurisdictions, to learn from incredible people, to travel, you know, it was just you know to build a network.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_03: It was an amazing, amazing and a privileged experience.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_03: But you you have to remember as well that actually when we were junior lawyers, this was pre-layman, right?
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_03: Pre-financial crisis, the economy was just going at 100 miles an hour.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_03: There was so much money everywhere, everyone was a deal junkie, and we didn't have the kind of tools that junior lawyers have now, going back to AI, that actually makes their day-to-day lives easier.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_03: So a lot of the work was actually quite menial.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_03: If you were a transactional lawyer, you spent a lot of time, you know, kind of breaking out documents where you needed the same document 50 times in a deal, but you had to change the names.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_03: So it was incredibly uh it was incredibly hard work.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_03: I think my average week was probably, as kind of you're suggesting, were like 80 or 90.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you know, there was a period where um, you know, I I worked so hard, so many kind of nights in a row that I got salmonella poisoning because my immune system was so down.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_03: And I'll never forget it, it was the weekend of the of the Whitechapel bombings, so the London bombings, right?
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_03: And a lot of the kind of the victims of that have been taken to Whitechapel hospital.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_03: And I was so poorly that I went in a taxi to Whitechapel and they saw me and they kind of got me through straight away the second I turned up.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_03: Because I don't think I could even tell them my name.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_03: I was I was just kind of so ill.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_03: And um, you know, so you could have moments like that in your career and you think this is probably taking it a little bit too far.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_02: You had the foresight to get in a cab though, because I felt ill when I was junior and drove myself to Amy at three in the morning.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure I had a car up here, but yeah, time more people than not have a similar story that they've pushed themselves to sort of physical break.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I I I could tell you similar stories of a lot of our kind of peers, um, both at uh you know not just at CC but in other magic circumfirms as well.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_03: Um it was a it was a pretty looking back, I think it was a pretty brutal pr pr pretty brutal time and a pretty brutal career path as well.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um But I don't ever I mean it sounds like lawyer limiting like no one ever's like to me you you must say like you must do this.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_02: It was just that I want to do the cool, high profile, really interesting first, you know, but like and I don't think that's really changed.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_02: You just you're just really driven, you want to be doing the good stuff, yeah.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_03: And once you were in on the deal, you were just all in.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_03: That's just how people worked, right?
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you know, I I remember as a trainee, I I um this was before we had Blackbriefs.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_03: Uh do you remember wanting to have a Blackbree?
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_03: Like envious of what you wish for, right?
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, exactly.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_03: But I remember going home because I thought we'd done we were done for the day.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_03: And then my supervisor were like ringing me at two in the morning saying you need to come back to the office, some more stuff just come in.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_03: And yeah, there's a lot of professions where that would be highly unacceptable, yeah, right.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_03: But as a junior lawyer in the magic circle, yeah, you you were back in the office within 15 minutes.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_02: So I I had to make some of that.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_02: I was I was working, I had the next week off, and it was Friday, six o'clock, and my supervisor said, I'm really sorry, but technically you're not on holiday till nine o'clock Monday.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_02: That's the weekend.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_01: If if someone has to make you do it, you'll never get there anyway, right?
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: You guys wanted to be in the room, you wanted to do those things.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: And and especially at that time, the deals are addictive, right?
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, absolutely.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you take ownership.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_03: This is the thing, right?
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_03: Even as a junior lawyer, you just take ownership and you kind of you think of it as your ordeal.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_03: And actually, like, you know, the partners are flying all over the world doing really interesting work and you know building businesses and stuff, they're not there looking over your shoulder every thing you write down on a on a contract, right?
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_03: They trust you to get on with it.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_03: So you you you're kind of you're given that autonomy and you and you take it or you or you or you don't.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_03: And if you don't, then you're not going to be doing many more deals after that, right?
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_01: So it's just the way it works.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: So you both talked about exceptional and brilliant people you met along the way.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_01: What were the attributes and characteristics that made people brilliant?
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_01: And you can pick whichever ones are popping into your head when you think about those, that next level of performer.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_02: So I I remember being in a room um with a German partner and there was this really it was on the phone back to the office in Berlin when CC had one, and it was really and he was and then the Indy just went und and hung up.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_02: And and I use that und all the time now because it was just like he'd received so much data.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_02: What are you telling?
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_02: So so when I'm looking at memos or advice or drafting, it's like, so what?
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_02: So that that sort of you know plays loudly in my ear.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_01: But the other thing that's so so when you when you say that point, it it was uh the demeanour, the calmness, the ability to focus on the a what actually is noise here and what signal and clients pay a lot of money for a city lawyer to give them advice.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_02: And if you're not giving them an answer, if you're saying that might be the answer and that might be the answer, I've s I've shown you the answer.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_02: One way or the other, I y y y that's no good.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_02: And it might be really tricky, and you have to say, well, it's probably that one because of XYZ?
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_02: Not 100%, but you you have to give an answer.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_02: So it was it was it was this so what I've I've heard loads of data, what do you want me to do with that?
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_02: And I think good lawyers are uh are really good at giving the advice, not just showing them the options.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_02: But but what really uh what I really remembered and what I tried to do with my team is is is just the humanity.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_02: I work with two I worked with two partners, Brian and Nigel, who were just decent people and who cared and who would say thank you.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think it's that was the that was the sort of the the take.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_02: I I don't think I could have done twelve years without working for humans.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_01: And is the skill set you need to be a great partner internally the same as you need to be a great partner for the client?
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_01: Is it the same skill set or different?
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_03: I I mean I think one of the reasons why this job is quite hard in some ways is the breadth of skills that you need to have.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_03: And those probably do apply both externally and internally.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_03: And yeah, if you looked at the best partners, they were able to go seamlessly from knowing the minute detail of a clause in a contract in one minute, yeah, to walking into a meeting room and charming clients the next, right?
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_03: Is you know, with very sort of extrovert personality, and and that skill set of being able to be really in the technical detail of something one second, but being the client's best mate the next, I think that's quite a difficult thing to achieve, right?
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of people are like a type of personality which doesn't lend itself to being able to adjust between those things just at the click of a finger.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_01: The people always get confused when they find out my PhD is in data and I'm a data geek because they're like, no, no, you're you're the podcast marketing guy.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_01: Like you're from marketing background, right?
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, nope, I'm a dead because they can't hold both things to be true at any point in time.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_03: But but but I think that's rare, right?
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_03: I think that's that's relatively rare.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_03: You know, that I think the the people who I've typically come across to as sort of more regulatory lawyers, and I just exclude you from this bend just for me.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_03: He's about to be nice to you.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_03: I feel a bit seen here.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_03: You know, incredible at knowing what that regulation says, but they're kind of so deep in kind of detail and they're so comfortable with with the paper that actually they forget about the fact that that law is a service industry, right?
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_03: And that's the thing we always need to do.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I think you can be too intelligent as a lawyer.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_02: Because I'm not.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_02: I see new legislation and I have to I you know read it three or four times before I even got a chance to understand it.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_02: Then I have to start thinking about worked examples and analogies, and and only then do I start to get it.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_02: But that's a good thing because it means I can take something super complex and I can explain it to an intelligent non-lawyer client as to how it works.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas some people you meet are just so insanely brilliant and they're reading it and they're like, Well, yeah, that's really obvious, isn't it?
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_01: One of our board members once described me as the perfect level of intelligence before it became a problem.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, I think that's nice.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_02: That's that's a great appraisal line, isn't it?
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_02: Take that.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but it's the same thing.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_01: What about you in terms of the the best of the best?
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_01: When you think back, who are the ones that you stick out?
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_01: And and have you tried to emulate aspects of their style or very much gone, no, no, that's them, that's not me.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_03: I think you have to do that.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_03: And I think the thing is when you when you first become a partner in a law firm, you you feel a lot of pressure.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_01: And does anyone sit you down and say the world's different now?
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_01: You're expected, you just have to figure out your own way.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_03: Your your first um experience of being a partner is your your inbox changes, right?
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_03: So overnight extra overnight you go from not ever receiving any emails about the management of the firm as a business.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_03: So 30th of April, you don't get any of that.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_03: 1st of May, suddenly every email about the management of the business comes into your inbox.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_03: And it's actually quite intimidating.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_01: And no one tells you what you're supposed to reply to or engage with, or you just have to work it out.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_03: It's like going back to your first day at work all over again.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_03: It really is.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_03: It's like you've just started a new job because you've got no idea.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_03: You a lot of the stuff you had no idea even existed.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_03: All these different committees or yeah, whatever, and and the you know, the accounting and the marketing, the business development, and all this kind of stuff.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_03: You you had have absolutely no idea.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_03: And I think you know, you start day one as a partner and you're dealing with that, and you're also feeling the pressure of, oh my god, I've got to like immediately justify my existence, like straight away.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_03: And and you're kind of wired for a while, right?
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_03: That first two or three years, I think you're you're just kind of running on adrenaline and probably just sort of all over the place.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_03: And that must actually be quite hard for people who you manage because uh because I think you know the level of energy that you're having to take to it is not necessarily conducive to the way that you know I certainly manage people now, which is giving people kind of trust and autonomy and letting their own personalities shine through.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_03: And I think you know, this is one of the issues that we grapple with, right?
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_03: Which is your clients are buying kind of you and your personality and your brain, right?
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_03: That's the product.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_03: And so as a partner, your kind of natural inclination is to say, well, that's what my client's buying.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_03: And so that's so that's what everybody on the deal has to be like.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_03: So everyone else on the deal has to think like me, has to act like me, has to kind of almost be a version of me.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_03: And and you can't, I mean, it it's obvious that you can't manage people like that.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_03: That's never going to work.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_03: You have to trust that that people will provide the same level of service to your client, but in their own kind of unique way.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_03: And I think once you start understanding that, the kind of the job of being a partner and managing people does become a bit easier.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_02: And I think as well as copying lessons from really positive role models, I remember think I I would spend more time looking at people around me and going, what do I not want to be like?
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_02: So as a trainee, when someone in another department partner took off his headset, threw it against the wall and smashed it because he didn't like what the other side had said.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_02: I remember thinking, I don't think I'm ever gonna do that.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_02: Not a good look.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_02: Or when you're in the lift uh and you just get totally blanked by a partner, and I was like, I'm not gonna do that.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_02: But now I'm old and I'm in the lift and I'm like, I can't remember your name.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_02: And so so actually I now look back and think, okay, that wasn't necessarily rudeness, that was just age.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um but but I remember thinking so many times, when I'm a partner, I'm not going to be like you more than I thought I'm gonna be just like you.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_02: So you can do the positive and negative.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think the thing that I'm really trying to avoid is hierarchy.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_03: That that's that's the thing that I've always now in your team.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's the thing that I've always kind of been a bit uncomfortable with in the way law firms are structured often is you have this kind of very sort of rigid, you know, you have the partner, and then you have the senior associate, and then you have the mid-level associate, and then you have the junior, and then you have the trainee, and there's a very sort of vertical kind of reporting line, and nobody can kind of step outside of that, and you know, it's all very kind of structured.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_03: And I just don't think that's the real world, at least not anymore.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_03: So, my team at least, we all sort of pitch in, we all do kind of a bit of everything.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_03: We don't have this kind of that's the partner's role, that's the junior lawyer's role.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we're kind of trying to just we genuinely work to teach juniors how to become partners, right?
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_02: So that on their first of May one day they know what you do with the profit and loss and and how you recruit and how you make the sales, yeah.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_01: The the um the business case recruitment is so you mentioned about what a client's buying and sitting on that side of the table.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_01: I think it is right, like you as individuals is a big part of that decision process.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_01: How much is things like personal brand and profile talked about with legal partners?
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_03: It's kind of weird, isn't it?
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_03: People are very much left to get on with it.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_03: I think that that's the theme, right?
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_03: That's the consistent theme as a partner.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_03: Like it it in many ways, you're your own kind of CEO, you're the CEO of a little mini business.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_03: So there's like loads of CEOs kind of all kind of doing their own thing.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_03: Now, obviously, there's management and there's coordination, and and and and law firms take the overall brand very seriously and and take you know significant steps as as they rightly should to protect the overall brand.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_03: But in terms of how partners project themselves to their clients or their kind of targets, that's incredibly autonomous.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think it's changing.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_02: I think actually AI is changing that in that you know, we uh at Galen we sort of talk about you know the silent lawyers and stuff, and there's there's lawyers who are very busy and got good clients and and and and doing very good work, but there's no sort of record of them outside that you know they're not necessarily going to the conferences speaking at conferences.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_02: They're not doing some of the BD events, they're not on LinkedIn, all this kind of stuff.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_02: And I, you know, I'm told that AI is a really good tool now for when you're trying to find your lawyers, um, because it will go through all the social stuff, all the press releases, but it also goes through the the the directories and what have you, so you can get a much clearer idea of what someone's expertise is rather than them just telling you in an email I'm amazing at XYZ.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_02: So I think I I think if you ask that in two or three years, there'll be many more partners who are who have got that social media profile and are and are constantly and actually trying to promote themselves and what they do.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_03: But but is that is that because of people personally curating their own brand, or is that because there's management intervention where people are saying you have to do X, Y, and Z in order to be consistent, you know, in order to make sure that all partners across the firm are consistently kind of doing the same things?
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_03: I'm I'm I'm I'm sure there will be some director to do it.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, there'll be good examples, right?
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, nature's a really good example, and and probably AI.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_02: Brand new asset class, a group of lawyers uh regularly out there developing something, winning work, um, building something quite exciting, and people go, okay, well, that's perhaps there are lessons to be learned.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_01: I I think it's coming.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_01: So I think we we don't have it yet.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_01: I think um I was interested because you two are amongst the most prominent lawyers in the sector, and in some industries, you that would be positive for generating business and clients, but internally, and and I and I don't know this about law firms, but certainly when I was in the public sector, I would be criticised for having a personal profile because it was like, no, no, the the name on the the badge is the company, not you.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, we we want all the then they'd ask me to do stuff on social media to publicize it.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_01: We want the brand, but no, no, it can't be about you.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas actually, uh OC, our collective brand and and mine has been a real positive for us having uh meeting people and connections and deals, and it's been such a factor.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I I was wondering, in terms of your respective, the fact that you have got these profiles, is it viewed positively versus negatively?
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_01: Then you describing in the future that you think it'll come, and I think it will as well, because that will be that personal point of differentiation from a generic AI-led lawyer to going for the person.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_02: I I've never had anyone, Gowling, be critical of my efforts to raise profile.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um have you had anyone ask you to do it more?
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_01: Has anyone said push harder with it?
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_02: No, because I think I probably do you know, if I'm not if I'm not asleep I'm on exceptional.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_02: If I'm not asleep, I'm on LinkedIn.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely love that platform.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_02: So so I I don't think I would welcome anyone encouraging me to do more on that sort of stuff.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, the broader profiling I think is is really encouraged.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_02: I think there's this Halo effect, I think it's really good for recruitment.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_02: I think you know, we're lucky that this this area of you know natural capital is interesting, it's appealing to junior or students.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you know, do I want to do that kind of work?
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely, I'm gonna get paid a decent amount of money working with great clients on phenomenal landscape recoveries.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_02: What why would you not want to do that?
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so I think it it it helps with with that kind of stuff.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um yeah, I mean, uh and yeah, we do we do dinners, we do events, we do um yeah, film screenings.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_02: So I think there's all this kind of I think it's it with a new industry or new asset, it's an opportunity to do things in a slightly different way.
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you you've got to build it and share about it.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_01: Because like again, five years ago, no one knew anything.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_01: There was nothing there that that existed.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_01: When you say you love LinkedIn, why do you love LinkedIn?
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um because you can find your people, right?
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_02: The criticism of LinkedIn is that you're in a bubble and you don't, you know, whereas Twitter you can sort of very easily find someone who has a different opinion to you.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um but it's it's a small community, I think, with this the natural capital, and and and you can find your folk, you can get all this phenomenal information.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's there's huge depth of stuff on there.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, there's even this podcast by a guy called Rich Doctor.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if you've come across it, but not on my radar.
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_02: It's all right.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_02: It's worth looking at.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_03: I'll tell you why I like the way that you use LinkedIn.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and it's this.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_03: We're getting on quite well.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_03: You I'm expecting the there's a is it coming?
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's because you two really love each other, you know you do.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_01: You just protest too much, usually.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_03: But I I love the way that you everyone on LinkedIn is delighted.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_03: I'm delighted.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_03: I have done X, Y, and Z.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_03: And it's 90% of the time just a huge self-promotion tool.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_03: Whereas I think people that use LinkedIn the best, I'm talking about kind of lawyers here, are people that use it to tell people stuff that's important.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe some analysis, some information.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_01: Adding some genuine value.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_03: Correct, exactly.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_03: And that's exactly how you use it.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_03: And and I thought your write-up of London Climate Action with the other day was was amazing, right?
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_03: Your nine or ten points.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_03: Um you know, to to distill that absolute chaos, right?
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_03: Which had gone on for hours and hours every day for a week into those nine points was was exceptionally helpful for people.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_03: Not just I'm delighted that I've won the latest award.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_03: And I and I and I think that that you use LinkedIn in a way which is which is less common, but I think a lot more valuable.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, generous.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_01: You're generous with what you put out on LinkedIn and uh authentic and honest about stuff, which I think is rare.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_03: And also much more hardworking than I am.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_03: All I really do is press the share button.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_03: So I've got something to look up to.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_01: But LinkedIn isn't your platform, right?
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_01: You're you're you are far more an in-person conversation relationship.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_01: Has it always been that way for you?
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_01: You just feel more authentic in that arena?
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think so.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, um I mean part of the problem is as well, like I'm I'm just across so many different sectors and industries that it's actually really hard for me to kind of spend the time kind of really drilling down on some of the detail and in some of the stuff on the show.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that that which is hard.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, yeah, most of my time is obviously spent doing doing transactions, right?
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_03: Which uh which a lot of the time are you know either confidential or you know, just just things that we're doing rather than talking about.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_03: Um so it just means the opportunities to do that kind of stuff are narrower.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_03: But that you know, I I should try to use it more.
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but it is it is hard when you're across a lot of sectors.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_02: So before nature, I mean you know, I did my environmental regulatory stuff, I did development, I would act for resi, I'd act for industrial, I'd like for energy.
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_02: Really hard to find threads because you do a post and a and a resi client might look at it and go, Why are you talking about that?
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_02: It's got nothing to do with me.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_02: Are you really in my sector?
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, nature's amazing because it's a green thread that goes through everything.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_02: Every sector, no matter what the size, no matter what the jurisdiction, is impacted by you know natural resources or has an impact on nature.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_02: And so you can talk about these things, and although I do loads more different bits outside of nature, it's a it's a brilliant thread, and that no one reads it and goes, that's irrelevant to me.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_01: The before we leave the sort of partner career path, are the skills that the next generation need to bring into the sector different from the ones you had?
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_01: And what would you encourage them to focus on if they want to be partners in the future?
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna go back to something that I said earlier, um, which is that this is a service industry.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_03: And that is the key point, that's the fundamental point in do you want to be a successful partner in a law firm?
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_03: Right, it's not about legal knowledge, it's not about can you draft an incredible contract, it's not even, you know, can you kind of stand up and advocate in a really convincing way?
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_03: Although obviously those things are part of it.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_03: But if you don't understand that you're selling something in a market which is actually quite competitive, and the easiest way to continue to do that is to build great relationships with people that get that are going to come back to you again and again because of how you treat them.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_03: If you don't understand that, you're gonna find it extremely difficult to have a long-term career as a partner in a law firm.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_03: Um, now around the edges, there's there are obviously different skills.
• 52:41
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, going back to the AI point, I mean, we didn't we did have some level of AI um you know growing up in law, but in a completely different way to how it looks now.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_03: And people, you know, lawyers are not gonna have successful careers if they don't understand how to integrate that into their practices.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_03: But I think the core proposition, which is you're selling something into a market, you need to be able to act in a way where you recognise and acknowledge that you are providing a service, is never gonna change.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_03: And actually, when people say to me, What's the best work experience I can do to prepare for a training contract and a career in law?
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_03: I don't say go and do a vacation scheme in a law firm in the city.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_03: I say go and work in a posh hotel, right?
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_03: Spend two weeks a month, whatever, literally serving, waiting hand and foot on the kind of clients that go and stay in posh hotels.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_03: That would teach you more about the skill set you need to be a lawyer or any professional services provider than two weeks doing the photocopying in a in a law firm ever would.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, no, I agree.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_02: That makes sense.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_02: I think I think um I think in an online world it's it's it's uh it's easy to lose those social skills picking up a phone.
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_01: Like whoever uses the phone anymore.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_01: I I think hospitality is I or if I see it on a CV, especially an extended period, slam dunk.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_01: Because it means you've put up with a lot, you've dealt with complex situations, you've turned up on time, you've dealt with uncomfortableness and difficult things, and I think it it does really help.
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_03: You learn how to deal with people shouting at you for things that aren't your fault, which is an incredibly good preparation for a career in law.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_01: In every career.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_02: So I don't think people not many shout is now.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_02: Well, probably less.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_03: There's different ways of shouting, aren't there?
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_01: We we we had so we were gonna do some filming with a third party.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, they didn't send the legal agreement, they wanted me to go do this filming thing, they didn't send the legal agreements through until it's for this week.
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_01: They didn't send them through till Thursday or Friday when they said they were coming weeks ago, and they wanted us to agree to them having complete control of my name, image, and likeness and voice forever in any which way they want.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_01: So we're like, no, of course we're not gonna do that.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_01: And the production company just started yelling at our team.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_01: Really?
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_01: So they had a nice chat with George, and we're not working with them ever again, of course.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, so it does still happen.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_02: But we've missed out on the little rich Stockdale merchandise toys and stuff, which we could all Christmas presents.
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, like the sort of bully in bullseye could have.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_01: That is a northern old school reference, isn't it?
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, yeah, we've lost kids now, haven't we?
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_01: Bully in bullseye.
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_03: People can look that up on YouTube, can't they?
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_01: My um the analogy about the relationship thing, I think, and I go back to sport and a lot of this stuff.
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_01: I think managing a relationship is the equivalent of passing and receiving a football.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_01: So, whatever position you play, you're gonna have to be able to receive the ball from someone, listen, and you're gonna be able to pass it to somebody else, communicate it.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the fundamental aspect.
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_01: And you look at the best football teams in the world, the Klopp and the Guadiola trained teams, they spend all their time doing little drills of actually passing and receiving the football over and over again.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's one of the things I love the most about this podcast.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_01: I've had a lot of reps listening and communicating stuff back to people, and I think all the time we spend teaching people the law or ecology, we spend such a small amount of time teaching communication effectively and things.
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, I do think hospitality and those skills in the age of the state.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_02: So what's the legal equivalent of passing like the um tiki tacker?
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_02: How do we how do we do that with our trainees?
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_03: Having the occasional real conversation in the office, which is always a good start.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, people will just rely on emails and uh it's not communications, it's exchanging it, isn't it?
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, I mean words, written words, you know, and I get emails from five metres away high then.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_02: Can you just say this could have been a chat?
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_03: This is exactly what I'm saying.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_03: Like, you know, just come round, right?
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_03: And or you know, ask someone to go for a coffee and talk about it.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_03: There's so many different ways you can do it.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_01: I I think so I've hit that I've hit that weird point now whereby every time I go for a meeting with some so we're 55 people in the business now, so that first cohort who were like working with me all the time, every day, up until like 15 or 20 people has changed, and we've got a lot of new people coming in.
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_01: And they're always thanking me for my time whenever I go to anything.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, can you stop doing that?
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I want to be here and have this conversation.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_01: So I think it's on us to go, no, no, like like we have to be the one on the lift that says hello.
• 57:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, because our job titles go before we do.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and it's so yeah, the most we can do to get rid of that hierarchy and be like, let's have a chat, what do you think?
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_01: So I still chair an all-staff meeting on a Monday morning when I can be there, and I make a point of like try try and force questions from the floor and Mick taking out of me as well, just to keep that as flat as possible.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_01: We um we briefly touched on on climate week there.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, what was your reflections on London Climate Week 2026?
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_02: I hadn't really done London Climate Week as much in previous years.
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_02: So we sort of we Hiddle you done New York before?
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_02: I've done yeah, I've done I've done New York and I've done the odd event at previous London Climate Weeks.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so I don't know if it's a bit like you know, when you buy a yellow car, all you see is yellow cars.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_02: And but I thought London Climate Week was an absolute rip-roaring success.
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_02: I loved it.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, we did a lot more events, which was so I saw a lot more people coming through our doors, went to more external events and caught up with most of the really important people in the NATCAP space, including you guys.
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_02: So it was great.
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I I loved it.
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_02: What disappointed me was but for the heat wave, there would have been nothing in the news about climate.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_02: And there wasn't, you know, when you go during a COP, and I get cops are different and they're international, but the headline news today at COP, this is what the government announced, all this kind of stuff.
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_02: There was none of that.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_02: So it was cool to hang out with the circle, but I don't know but for the weather, whether we would have broken through.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_02: And that's the most important bit.
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_01: So let's put a pin in what we can do about that to make that better in future.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_01: What was your experience like in the week?
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I I kind of agree with that because it risks becoming a bit of a bubble, doesn't it?
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_03: If the nature community is there for week talking to each other and having a great time, but there's no export.
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_03: But uh, I do think you know, I kept bumping into very senior people at at big organizations, and for me that's always the yardstick of is this actually kind of worth the time investment?
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, who else is in the room?
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_03: It's not so much about really the content because you kind of take that as red, but it's you know, what what's the nature of the people that are in the room talking about this stuff?
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_02: No, and I go, and I and I think you're right.
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_02: In the I mean, you know, when we went to COP 16 in Cali, right?
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's 20,000 people all going, nature is amazing.
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_02: Very different from when you go to a UNF UNF CCC COP where half the people are going, we need to do more on climate, and half people are saying, Oh, slow down.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_02: So nature, and and I know this was climb climate action week was was both sides, but like we spent a bit too much time in the nature bubble, and everyone is like, We need to do more, we need to do faster.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't it'd almost be a bit more fun if we had some detractors in our in our midst to make us articulate things in a different way and communicate more differently.
• 1:00:07
  SPEAKER_02: That's interesting.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_01: So um bizarrely, it's the first time we've properly done London.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_01: So we've done New York, San Francisco, Zurich, and now London.
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_01: We did one announcement London last year, which was the world record, world record carbon price.
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, outside of that, I'd never done anything London before.
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_01: I was a bit cynical about it.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, okay, it's gonna be either old school environment sector telling everybody it's all sad and people wanting to be seen to be in the environment sector, or it was gonna be people just talking to themselves about the stuff they already know.
• 1:00:39
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, I thought it was a rip-roaring success as well.
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_01: Like I love you almost.
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_01: The the 10 point yards that you did.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_01: Did you publish a how you were going to measure it beforehand, or did you just I thought you did at the beginning of the week?
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_02: I said these are my 10 tests, yeah, and then created a rod for my own back, knowing that on Friday I was gonna have to actually write it up.
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and and I thought they were they were absolutely the right test, you know.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_01: What is this actually achieving?
• 1:01:02
  SPEAKER_01: And you you you were right that it didn't get the media traction that it it should have done otherwise.
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but I think in every other way, the quality of conversations were better.
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_01: The the creativity, the innovation around stuff, like the event you hosted was brilliant because it that could have just been a us sat there in a very sterile make a case argument.
• 1:01:21
  SPEAKER_01: Like the panel I did the year before, um, we did our announcement, I went to another panel, each of the members got asked to do a 15-minute monologue and they closed the panel.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_01: It was like I was falling asleep on stage, never mind the audience.
• 1:01:33
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, you want to just describe the event you put on because I thought that was a massive success.
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, yeah, it was a kind of a debate format, right?
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_03: So we took some questions from the audience, um, and there were two teams on the stage, and um, each team took it in turns to respond to the questions from a particular point of view, right?
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_03: The central theme was do we need government intervention in order to accelerate nature becoming an investable infrastructure asset class?
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_03: And then all of the questions were related to that central theme.
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so it just meant that we kind of broke it up a bit.
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it was quite rapid fire, people talking for two or three minutes in response to each question, people the audience hearing from kind of different people on the two panels in quite a quick quick way.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and and I think you know, your your your eyes were constantly kind of moving to the next person, right?
• 1:02:27
  SPEAKER_03: Which didn't didn't give people the opportunity to kind of get into that kind of oh, this is really dull kind of lull.
• 1:02:33
  SPEAKER_03: Um so yeah, I think it did, I think it was good, and we did get a lot of good um good feedback as people were kind of leaving.
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_01: So the audience was so varied, you went from literal investors, uh, institutional and private capital all the way through to students and people at the start of their career.
• 1:02:51
  SPEAKER_01: So I think from your we as a team we did 40, no, 48 events across the week, I think.
• 1:02:57
  SPEAKER_01: 48.
• 1:02:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, which I love because it meant, and and we talked about this a little bit earlier in terms of it almost being the partner's profile.
• 1:03:04
  SPEAKER_01: One of my things I'm really conscious of now is if we get an invite for something, I'm like, who else is better to do it?
• 1:03:10
  SPEAKER_01: Because it can't just be rich turning up at everything.
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_01: And and I'm often not the best person to talk about a topic now.
• 1:03:15
  SPEAKER_01: Like if someone wants us to talk about our peatland delivery or our woodland planning, I'm not the best person to talk about that anymore.
• 1:03:20
  SPEAKER_01: Like fee is in who's running oxygen conservation now and the individual parts of the business.
• 1:03:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so it was yeah, it was interesting to be able to uh address some of those questions from different perspectives and us to teach some different bits and pieces, but yeah, that that felt different this week.
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_01: The sheer volume, the range of stuff, how creative and playful it was.
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um yeah, my my favorite one was we we joked five years ago that when you ended up with Blackrock interested in the sector, it had hit a level of sophistication.
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and on the Thursday night, Sherry who was on your your panel, um, invited a load of people to talk about natural capital at BlackRock, which was like, hold on, this is a sector and an asset class growing up.
• 1:04:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, do you feel that similar level of maturity kick in?
• 1:04:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.
• 1:04:09
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, uh last week we had another city-based institutional asset manager saying, right, we've acquired a big slug of land and we want to do something with it.
• 1:04:18
  SPEAKER_02: How do we do it?
• 1:04:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and every month we're getting a proper blue chip reputable outfit saying, Can you help us?
• 1:04:27
  SPEAKER_02: This is our first time we're doing it, we want to get it right.
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_02: But this has gone to investment committee and it's a proper investment.
• 1:04:34
  SPEAKER_02: We're not doing this so that the chair can have their photo on the front cover of the the um the corporate in-house magazine with sort of a spade saying, Look at me, I'm planting a tree, you know, CSR type, it's proper.
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_02: No, this is a financial play and it feels that it's it's a real thing then, isn't it?
• 1:04:56
  SPEAKER_02: Which is really cool.
• 1:04:58
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and um if you look at how some of the off takers are approaching this, they are asking the right questions.
• 1:05:08
  SPEAKER_03: It's not just okay, I'm gonna buy some credits or some nature shares.
• 1:05:13
  SPEAKER_03: Great, I can report on them uh under TNFD and I'm done.
• 1:05:19
  SPEAKER_03: They're saying, How do I know that you're gonna continue to maintain this land for 33 years?
• 1:05:24
  SPEAKER_03: What happens if you go insolvent?
• 1:05:26
  SPEAKER_03: What happens if the land gets sold?
• 1:05:28
  SPEAKER_03: They're looking at it, yeah.
• 1:05:29
  SPEAKER_03: How do you prove that you've actually derived you know delivered the benefit that you've promised to do it?
• 1:05:34
  SPEAKER_02: I do wonder whether that's because of the market we're in.
• 1:05:36
  SPEAKER_02: So our clients are so you know, the fact that they can afford good legal advice, they're wanting to make sure that this is not just a compliance tick box.
• 1:05:46
  SPEAKER_02: They're wanting to know that they're putting their name to something good.
• 1:05:50
  SPEAKER_02: I do sometimes wonder if there's a you know a market that we're not seeing.
• 1:05:58
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, uh almost certainly.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_01: But I think that's a good thing.
• 1:06:01
  SPEAKER_01: So you can still buy a bad car if you want to.
• 1:06:05
  SPEAKER_01: That's the nature of a market, right?
• 1:06:07
  SPEAKER_01: You can go buy a Tesla or you can buy a Vauxhall.
• 1:06:09
  SPEAKER_01: I I've had three courses in my younger years.
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_01: They were all right.
• 1:06:12
  SPEAKER_01: I can see you in that.
• 1:06:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not happy about the fact that that was a thing.
• 1:06:15
  SPEAKER_01: Underfloor lighting.
• 1:06:16
  SPEAKER_01: But that's a market.
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_01: Underfloor lighting.
• 1:06:19
  SPEAKER_01: Not quite.
• 1:06:19
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't have it.
• 1:06:20
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't that posh.
• 1:06:21
  SPEAKER_01: But that's a market, right?
• 1:06:22
  SPEAKER_01: You need a range of products, you need choices.
• 1:06:24
  SPEAKER_01: You know, people need to be able to choose the high-end premium type thing all the way through to something that is lower quality, carries more risk, and is is more affordable.
• 1:06:34
  SPEAKER_01: So I think we probably are more prone to seeing the high end of stuff, but we need all of it.
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, although where's the breach going to be?
• 1:06:44
  SPEAKER_01: So it's it's going to be at the It is.
• 1:06:46
  SPEAKER_01: It is.
• 1:06:47
  SPEAKER_01: So jumping back to BNG for a second, um, I I think we've we've progressed in so many different ways.
• 1:06:53
  SPEAKER_01: The big question that sits there is who is the arbiter?
• 1:06:57
  SPEAKER_01: Who's who's the actual person who is going to monitor and flag the breach?
• 1:07:01
  SPEAKER_01: And and I I heard a suggestion the other day, do we end up with almost like a G4S private uh enforcement body or regulator for BNG and nature?
• 1:07:11
  SPEAKER_01: Do you do you think we'll see something?
• 1:07:12
  SPEAKER_02: Well we can't have that, don't you?
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_02: In the sense of responsible bodies.
• 1:07:15
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I suppose, yeah, that's the that's the private private sector taking over enforcement of standards for nature's benefit.
• 1:07:23
  SPEAKER_02: I mean it's it's sort of outsourcing Natural England's job, isn't it?
• 1:07:27
  SPEAKER_02: Or the EAs.
• 1:07:28
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:07:28
  SPEAKER_03: And that's the argument that that the developers are making, isn't it?
• 1:07:32
  SPEAKER_03: To their buyers.
• 1:07:33
  SPEAKER_03: They're saying this is independently verified and and and checked by responsible bodies, and that's the comfort that you're getting that we're doing this properly.
• 1:07:44
  SPEAKER_01: Have we had a test case yet as one as a zero challenge company?
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_02: And it won't be an off-site habitat bank, it'll be an on-site delivery, and in five years' time there'll be you know small resi units, 50 50 units, whatever, and people go, Why why are we why is that scruffy bit?
• 1:07:58
  SPEAKER_02: Can we not just mow it, get rid of it, so we can play football on there?
• 1:08:02
  SPEAKER_02: And it'll be how so I so I'm less worried about the off-site, because I think that's you you're right, it's got the regulator.
• 1:08:08
  SPEAKER_02: The on-site's more than likely got a 106 for local planning authority, they've received all the financial contributions.
• 1:08:14
  SPEAKER_02: The person who did the 106 has long since moved on, so they're not worried about the annual monitoring port, and it drifts, it looks scruffy, and it's and it's silently got rid of.
• 1:08:25
  SPEAKER_02: And it's how everyone comes together to either stop that or how to stop well to have to stop it happening again.
• 1:08:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and I I don't have a good enough sense of the relative scale of the on-site delivery against you know the the mega habitat banks as to whether to know whether that really matters.
• 1:08:44
  SPEAKER_02: I mean the the you know the the the big national house builders are getting it right, yeah.
• 1:08:49
  SPEAKER_02: And and they're phenomenal, and you've talked about Neil already, but you know that that guy has put nature on a FT100 board and they're taking it seriously.
• 1:08:58
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's the real success of BNG.
• 1:09:01
  SPEAKER_02: It's a it's a pilot scheme.
• 1:09:03
  SPEAKER_02: One or two sectors, you know, development and energy.
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_02: If you're putting a spade in the ground, it applies to you.
• 1:09:08
  SPEAKER_02: Smallish but notable sector in a small country, and it's working.
• 1:09:13
  SPEAKER_01: When we go internationally, it's the first thing I'm asked about.
• 1:09:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:09:17
  SPEAKER_01: Especially in the US, they're like, we need that, and you have to explain.
• 1:09:20
  SPEAKER_01: You kind of came up with it.
• 1:09:21
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:09:22
  SPEAKER_03: But this is why we need to talk about it in New York.
• 1:09:24
  SPEAKER_03: You know, people people need to kind of know how this is working.
• 1:09:27
  SPEAKER_01: That is a beautiful um segue back to the um you both do a great job of convening people, and you know, when you pull stuff together, there are MPs and in literal like chief investment officers at serious institutions.
• 1:09:42
  SPEAKER_01: Perhaps we need to bring the media in instead.
• 1:09:44
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe that's the thing we can do in terms of convening power to make sure the messages out of Climate Week uh uh are heard further afield.
• 1:09:51
  SPEAKER_01: You know, when we do New York, let's let's reach out and invite um full disclosure for people listening.
• 1:09:57
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna try and do some events to help showcase the UK approach to natural capital and the things we can do in New York.
• 1:10:02
  SPEAKER_01: Let's invite the media and say we want to talk about this.
• 1:10:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but are you gonna get two specialist media?
• 1:10:09
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe to start with.
• 1:10:10
  SPEAKER_01: But it's the st it's the stuff a bit like you articulated um as the uh prevalence of personal brand and thing grows in the legal profession, it will be a person, then it'll be a few people, then it'll become an expectation or encouraged, then it'll become a requirement.
• 1:10:25
  SPEAKER_01: So you've got to climb climb that ladder.
• 1:10:26
  SPEAKER_01: We we've seen it at OC when when I we hired a photographer, third person into the business, and I um we we were looking at a graph earlier of my LinkedIn connections, and it's like nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing over the last sort of 12 months.
• 1:10:40
  SPEAKER_01: Now you've got 10 or 15 people actively publishing, writing, sharing their content.
• 1:10:46
  SPEAKER_01: That only happens if somebody senior makes it okay and like encourages it.
• 1:10:50
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, let's invite the media and get the specialist people and start having the conversation, and then in time we'll get the sort of broader coverage.
• 1:10:58
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe it is that sport route, maybe it is something that gives people a resonance of grabbing the topic and actually wanting to talk about.
• 1:11:05
  SPEAKER_01: I think it'll be the AI and the data side of stuff as much as anything, because unless they get their environmental and social license right, they just won't be allowed to function or operate.
• 1:11:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:11:15
  SPEAKER_03: No, I I think that's I think that's a great point.
• 1:11:18
  SPEAKER_03: We should definitely try and do that.
• 1:11:20
  SPEAKER_01: What do um so we're recording this in the middle of the second heat wave of of this year that's gonna be uh, as you quite rightly said, I don't know if this is before we started recording, the coldest summer we're gonna have.
• 1:11:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you've got to stop talking about the hottest.
• 1:11:33
  SPEAKER_02: It's not my my youngest is nine.
• 1:11:36
  SPEAKER_02: He will look back to the good old days of 2026 when it was, you know, you could still function.
• 1:11:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um so Elena Dom's, our amazing director of Europe, she shared a um a sort of mock-up uh satirical weather forecast from 2014 of what 2050 would look like and it wasn't as hot as what we've got right now.
• 1:11:59
  SPEAKER_01: Really?
• 1:11:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, literally what we thought 2050 in a terrible scenario would look like, we're already there.
• 1:12:04
  SPEAKER_02: So in 10 years we've accelerated beyond 35 years of estimation.
• 1:12:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:12:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think if we start talking about it as good, yeah, the hottest, it's it's a record broken every five minutes, it loses its sheen because next year will be hotter, and next year will be hotter.
• 1:12:18
  SPEAKER_01: And and the narrative now, more than not, is yeah, it's a bit uncomfortable, but it's quite nice, really.
• 1:12:23
  SPEAKER_01: Because we have crack weather in the UK.
• 1:12:25
  SPEAKER_01: Because I don't think we're yet feeling the the impact of it.
• 1:12:29
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, we we talked earlier about the impact on sport and how you know in the US there are hundreds of deaths a year that relate to heat injuries from like young athletes that overheat playing sport and they've had to stop them playing in Australia at certain temperatures.
• 1:12:42
  SPEAKER_01: In the UK, yet it's still almost nice and it's still almost pleasant until you know it's too hot to sleep or whatever, but we're not seeing the the terrible impacts of it yet, enough for it to bite and grab, I don't think.
• 1:12:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I agree, and we also have extremely short memories, right?
• 1:12:58
  SPEAKER_03: So as soon as we get into the autumn and it starts being cold again, everyone will forget that it was 38 degrees in London all week.
• 1:13:05
  SPEAKER_03: And I think I think that's exactly the problem.
• 1:13:09
  SPEAKER_03: Like people can only really see what's in front of them.
• 1:13:11
  SPEAKER_03: So we're not really getting the wildfires, you know.
• 1:13:14
  SPEAKER_03: We're not getting the sort of the worst stuff.
• 1:13:17
  SPEAKER_02: No, I mean I I remember I mean I'm out in Essex, and I remember a couple of years ago I could smell smoke because there was some um in Tilbury or not at Tilbury, anyway, somewhere near the M25.
• 1:13:28
  SPEAKER_02: And so you that that was quite a moment.
• 1:13:32
  SPEAKER_02: But um yeah, until they're frequently stopping and and trains, I mean that's the other thing, isn't it?
• 1:13:38
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you see the trains is you know the the points getting too hot, the overhead lines getting too hot, which is not.
• 1:13:44
  SPEAKER_01: I came back from London back in the last week and it was chaos once you went to the Midlands, everything was cancelled because the points had failed because of heat.
• 1:13:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:13:52
  SPEAKER_01: Not good.
• 1:13:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's only the beginning, right?
• 1:13:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's only the beginning.
• 1:13:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um what's on your respective agendas for the remainder of the summer and and the year in things that relate to nature and climate?
• 1:14:07
  SPEAKER_02: So next week I'm going to Switzerland on holiday because my youngest has seen Mickey Mouse lots of times around the world, but he's never seen a mountain.
• 1:14:18
  SPEAKER_02: And more importantly, he's not seen a glacier.
• 1:14:21
  SPEAKER_02: And if we don't go soon, he's not gonna see the glaciers.
• 1:14:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um and it's also gonna be a bit cooler higher up.
• 1:14:29
  SPEAKER_02: So we're we're we're taking the electric car down there, which would be good.
• 1:14:32
  SPEAKER_01: So you're gonna drive to Switzerland?
• 1:14:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:14:35
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm quite looking forward to it, although three kids in the back might be a bit um 2017 and nine, they're all gonna be sort of elbowing and trying to work out who's the biggest.
• 1:14:46
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, so so seeing a glass will be good fun.
• 1:14:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um and then it's yeah, gearing up for the autumn.
• 1:14:52
  SPEAKER_02: There's there's there's COP 17 in Yerevan, there's New York Climate Week, there's COP 31, is it?
• 1:14:58
  SPEAKER_02: I forget the numbers by now.
• 1:14:59
  SPEAKER_02: Or is it 32 in Turkey?
• 1:15:02
  SPEAKER_01: And what do you um we'll go you first, rush of the year priorities?
• 1:15:06
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, we've we've got some some deals to close, um, which is obviously always the kind of the first first priority, really.
• 1:15:15
  SPEAKER_02: You've made me look bad now because of my clients like, are you not gonna do my deals?
• 1:15:18
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, while whilst you're looking at glaciers, yeah, you know, we're but that's his authentic social media reach out there.
• 1:15:26
  SPEAKER_01: That's the hearts and minds playing to his audience.
• 1:15:27
  SPEAKER_03: I think there's there's room for different approaches, isn't there?
• 1:15:30
  SPEAKER_03: Um and and the yeah, yeah, I think COP17 has got some real momentum building to it.
• 1:15:37
  SPEAKER_03: I think there's yeah, COP16 was excellent in um in Kali.
• 1:15:42
  SPEAKER_03: There was a lot of really interesting stuff going on and and good people there.
• 1:15:46
  SPEAKER_03: And I think COP17 will be even better.
• 1:15:48
  SPEAKER_02: So I like the idea that biodiversity cops every two years as well.
• 1:15:53
  SPEAKER_02: Because you can kind of look forward to it, and there's a bit of momentum, and it feels like that's the one opportunity the international nature community comes together.
• 1:15:59
  SPEAKER_02: I know they do a bit in New York and London, but it's um with the carbon cop every two years, the climate change cop every one year, sorry.
• 1:16:07
  SPEAKER_02: It it it just feels a little bit same agenda, same frustration at the end when no one mentions fossil fuels and it's all a bit it it it always feels like a a a bad news conference.
• 1:16:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um London this year felt more honest, but like there wasn't that there wasn't the elephant in the room that people aren't talking about.
• 1:16:28
  SPEAKER_01: You know, people were talking about the climate, they were talking about the weather, they were being honest about stuff, but actually it was we have done this, we know we still need to do this, but people actually had enough things they could point out that they'd achieved and they'd done.
• 1:16:38
  SPEAKER_01: And um we have come so far in in five years.
• 1:16:42
  SPEAKER_01: You you mentioned um Peter and Gresham's impact.
• 1:16:46
  SPEAKER_01: What are the things you hope we might see this year that would give us a similar sort of step forward, or what are the things that the sector and the market need to keep progressing?
• 1:16:56
  SPEAKER_03: So I mean I don't I don't know whether you know this year is kind of realistic in terms of timing for where the market needs to go.
• 1:17:06
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, if you look at the thing that which really made the biggest difference to uh the energy transition ability to attract scale of capital, it was people stopped uh investing in companies and started investing in projects.
• 1:17:26
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe they didn't stop investing in companies, but alongside investment in companies, they started investing in projects.
• 1:17:32
  SPEAKER_03: And investing in projects creates the ability to access an entirely different kind of capital.
• 1:17:38
  SPEAKER_03: And that's where you're gonna get the scale because commercial banks and investment banks and equity can come in and say, I know that if that thing goes wrong, my risk is limited to just that thing going wrong, right?
• 1:17:54
  SPEAKER_03: It's not going to trip the whole business.
• 1:17:58
  SPEAKER_03: So my my risk is just this amount of capital that I've deployed on this single project.
• 1:18:05
  SPEAKER_03: And that's a it's always been a very useful kind of investment mechanism.
• 1:18:11
  SPEAKER_03: We call it kind of limited recourse.
• 1:18:14
  SPEAKER_03: And if we can develop a model which lean kind of lends itself to that, so people can say, right, this project has got a long-term fixed revenue credit worthy off-taker or off-take contract, we deal with the stranded asset risk, you know, of that off-taker going and solvent or you know, kind of not owning the critical infrastructure assets that it needs to be protected anymore.
• 1:18:42
  SPEAKER_03: Or yeah, whatever, whatever it is, if we can solve that, if we can find the right insurance products, if we can make sure that we're, you know, as a sector, we're kind of comfortable with the people that are managing that habitat, then you can start to create something which looks very much like an investable project.
• 1:19:00
  SPEAKER_03: And that will really precipitate a whole kind of new load of money coming into the sector.
• 1:19:07
  SPEAKER_03: But I don't think we're there, and I don't know when we're gonna get there.
• 1:19:11
  SPEAKER_03: You know, there's there's a lot of interesting discussions around the sort of resilience market, whether you know people can can can mitigate things like flood risk through nature-based solutions, which is gonna mean that the insurance premiums go down, compensation payments uh are gonna decrease, and there will be therefore money for people to pay for nature-based solutions, and that's something that you think, well, that could be securitised, that could that could become an investment project.
• 1:19:39
  SPEAKER_01: A one and done thing.
• 1:19:40
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's the key part about those sort of ecosystem service contracts.
• 1:19:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's more akin to a renewable energy facility and that it'll keep going year on year, whereas at the moment the carbon or your BNG is sold once and done.
• 1:19:53
  SPEAKER_03: That's exactly it, and that's where the where the parallel with then with energy comes in.
• 1:19:57
  SPEAKER_03: You know, you structure that as a some sort of nature service payment, which is which is made every year for 15 years, that allows you to get kind of the debt in, which allows you to get the equity in in order to have that capital stack.
• 1:20:13
  SPEAKER_03: Whereas at the moment, as you say, Rich, the front loading of the off-take does create a real kind of problem for people that are trying to kind of utilize structures from other sectors.
• 1:20:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's really interesting in that it it kind of highlights the two phases I have to think about in terms of our business.
• 1:20:34
  SPEAKER_01: So um I love what Rob Gardner's doing about these paid ecosystem services.
• 1:20:40
  SPEAKER_01: So uh on the marketing and branding side of stuff, we we owe a lot of thanks to Rob because he was the first person I ever heard about um framing it as natural infrastructure and bringing and borrowing that language to the sector.
• 1:20:52
  SPEAKER_01: He's also actively doesn't like the discussion around credits or units because it's one and done.
• 1:20:58
  SPEAKER_01: He wants contracts because it's repetitive, so I think he's doing great work around there.
• 1:21:02
  SPEAKER_01: The difficulty is I I want that future to come and very happy to spot Robin whatever we can to develop those systems and processes.
• 1:21:10
  SPEAKER_01: But with our portfolio, we're sat on 500 million pounds worth of value, and almost I have to make that as boring as possible because it is a real asset, and our our natural capital is predicated on regulated credits or markets or where it's voluntary, it's on UK Woodland and Peatland Code, things that are real.
• 1:21:30
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas in the future we're thinking about innovative, developing future revenue streams, whereas that first portfolio, we put no value on those things that might come in the future, but to protect the value we've created at the minute, it has to be boring, dull, dependable, safe.
• 1:21:43
  SPEAKER_01: Because if we want to get institutional investment in, which I agree, all those things you were pointing to are what we need to get that capital in.
• 1:21:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's not six months, it's probably five years still.
• 1:21:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think just to make it possible for them to even embed.
• 1:21:56
  SPEAKER_03: But look, we need to have different structures, right?
• 1:21:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we need to have a we haven't got the business model right yet at all.
• 1:22:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, but we we we need to have different ways of looking at it.
• 1:22:03
  SPEAKER_03: We need to have deals which are inherently kind of land deals, we need to have credit deals, right?
• 1:22:09
  SPEAKER_03: We need to have you know voluntary nature shares, whatever you want to call them deals, and we need to have the sort of um, you know, the kind of resilience market, nature-based solutions contract deals, and and we need all of those different things.
• 1:22:22
  SPEAKER_03: We need people to have the choice, you know, do I invest in a management team or do I invest in a project?
• 1:22:28
  SPEAKER_03: That's actually how you build a sector.
• 1:22:29
  SPEAKER_03: You give you give options so that different types of capital can come in at different levels on different kinds of projects.
• 1:22:39
  SPEAKER_01: And it's almost like what we've done, but at 10x the speed as well, because of the the global reach and growth of it.
• 1:22:47
  SPEAKER_01: But they're still groping around for what the right business model is.
• 1:22:49
  SPEAKER_01: So you had open AI accelerate off direct to customer.
• 1:22:52
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we're we're looking at whether we offer a direct to customer carbon and nature-based product at the moment, and we keep going back and forward on it.
• 1:22:59
  SPEAKER_01: Someone's going to, someone's going to offer that direct to customer by the gram.
• 1:23:04
  SPEAKER_01: So we had a room full of hundreds of people.
• 1:23:06
  SPEAKER_01: If we'd have put a QR code up and said who wants to offset their travel here, we we think it's 10 grams a mile or whatever you did.
• 1:23:13
  SPEAKER_01: There's your QR code, and you can guarantee this project is high quality.
• 1:23:17
  SPEAKER_01: A good chunk of that room would have I got asked, I did a I did an event, I did a book festival uh on that one last week in in Wales, the Love Trails Running Festival.
• 1:23:26
  SPEAKER_01: I went and and spoke at the Rebel Book Club.
• 1:23:29
  SPEAKER_01: You guys heard of them?
• 1:23:30
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't.
• 1:23:30
  SPEAKER_01: They're amazing.
• 1:23:31
  SPEAKER_01: They um I came to books late in life, partly due to the Rebel Book Club, which was like they'd flash up one non-fiction book that they said if you read this, it'll fundamentally change something about the way you think.
• 1:23:41
  SPEAKER_01: And then so it was a kind of full circle moment to go speak at this event.
• 1:23:45
  SPEAKER_01: So it was a tent full of like 200 trail runners that I did this QA with.
• 1:23:49
  SPEAKER_01: Hand went up, can I offset my traveller?
• 1:23:52
  SPEAKER_01: I want to buy carbon.
• 1:23:52
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, you can't yet, but someone will be able to.
• 1:23:56
  SPEAKER_02: It'll be like the McDonald's thing, right?
• 1:23:57
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you maybe you don't go to McDonald's as often as I do, but you know, it's eight pounds something.
• 1:24:01
  SPEAKER_02: Do I want to round up to nine pounds for the Ronald McDonald's?
• 1:24:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:24:05
  SPEAKER_02: And it'll just become uh a roundup.
• 1:24:07
  SPEAKER_01: Have you heard of stability?
• 1:24:09
  SPEAKER_01: A guy called Will Folks.
• 1:24:10
  SPEAKER_01: Right, okay.
• 1:24:11
  SPEAKER_01: And they have a green margin that they do that exact product, and it's now been rolled out into co-ops around the southeast, I think, and it's routing funds already to wildlife trust, doing that exactly.
• 1:24:23
  SPEAKER_02: Just the roundup will be a great way.
• 1:24:24
  SPEAKER_02: And I think you'll get I think in the next six, twelve months you'll have the first voluntary uh purchase of environment of nature shares or nature credits or certificates, whatever you want to call them.
• 1:24:35
  SPEAKER_02: And then I think the NCIP coming in is gonna make a big difference as well, right?
• 1:24:38
  SPEAKER_02: You're gonna get really chunky off takes.
• 1:24:41
  SPEAKER_01: And some individual projects need thousands of units.
• 1:24:44
  SPEAKER_02: And and what's really good about that, because you haven't got your spatial multiply, have you so much?
• 1:24:48
  SPEAKER_02: So you're gonna get areas where there isn't loads of town and country planning development, therefore doesn't really need a huge habitat bank, but are actually really lacking in biodiversity.
• 1:24:58
  SPEAKER_02: And so the the beauty of being able to do your offset wherever you need in England means that parts where there isn't a big local market can really go hard on the NSIP stuff.
• 1:25:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:25:08
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that's quite exciting.
• 1:25:09
  SPEAKER_01: And you can maximize for impact on that basis because you are getting connectivity and scale and and all those things.
• 1:25:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, one of the one of the ideas we're building towards that that was facilitated by some introductions you made actually.
• 1:25:20
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to try and put together a specific institutional advisory panel for us who every X number of months or whatever will come together and tell us because you know we've built a product that is aimed at corporate and private markets.
• 1:25:34
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't ever aimed at institutional capital.
• 1:25:37
  SPEAKER_01: But what do we need to change collectively to make it easier for you guys?
• 1:25:40
  SPEAKER_01: Not now, but in five years.
• 1:25:42
  SPEAKER_01: What are the things, decisions we could make now that we help move the market towards them?
• 1:25:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:25:47
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that's something we're kind of in six months, but we'll we'll start that process.
• 1:25:51
  SPEAKER_03: Excellent idea.
• 1:25:52
  SPEAKER_01: Gentlemen, I finished the podcast in the same way each time, um, and you both get an answer.
• 1:25:57
  SPEAKER_01: What is the one question I haven't asked you you wish I had?
• 1:26:01
  SPEAKER_02: What's your favourite dinosaur?
• 1:26:04
  SPEAKER_02: Everyone had a favourite dinosaur when they're growing up, and at some point in our lives it became taboo to talk about your favourite dinosaur.
• 1:26:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I think this is a safe space, Ben.
• 1:26:13
  SPEAKER_01: What is your favourite dinosaur?
• 1:26:15
  SPEAKER_02: So I've got two.
• 1:26:16
  SPEAKER_02: I've got a real favourite, but I struggle to pronounce it.
• 1:26:18
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 1:26:19
  SPEAKER_02: So I generally go safe with stegosaurus, which is my my second favourite, but I think the real one is Parasolophus.
• 1:26:26
  SPEAKER_02: So it's like it's got that like Nike swoosh coming off the back of its head.
• 1:26:30
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 1:26:31
  SPEAKER_01: No one's asked about favourite dinosaur before.
• 1:26:34
  SPEAKER_02: Favourite dinosaur?
• 1:26:36
  SPEAKER_03: Stegosaurus.
• 1:26:37
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's good.
• 1:26:38
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:26:38
  SPEAKER_03: Solid.
• 1:26:39
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:26:40
  SPEAKER_02: Anything herbivorous?
• 1:26:41
  SPEAKER_01: I f I feel an affinity to a triceratops.
• 1:26:44
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's the shape and size.
• 1:26:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, which when people go T-Rex, you just it's just way too obvious.
• 1:26:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it is true.
• 1:26:50
  SPEAKER_01: Nathy, you also get a final closing question.
• 1:26:53
  SPEAKER_01: Beat back is pretty good.
• 1:26:55
  SPEAKER_03: That is pretty good, isn't it?
• 1:26:57
  SPEAKER_03: Um I don't really have anything for this.
• 1:27:02
  SPEAKER_03: I'd like to ask you a question though.
• 1:27:05
  SPEAKER_01: What's my favourite dinosaur?
• 1:27:08
  SPEAKER_03: So I think you you are one of the most sort of passion or outwardly passionate people in the market on this stuff.
• 1:27:17
  SPEAKER_03: And the thing that that makes me wonder is for you, what's the sort of balance right between I'm trying to build sort of this incredible, investable, profitable business versus I kind of really believe that this is making a difference to you know how we live and how our children are going to live.
• 1:27:41
  SPEAKER_03: Because I'm sure that it's you know there's a percentage on both sides, but I've kind of always wondered like where does that where does that balance it?
• 1:27:56
  SPEAKER_01: In somebody hates it.
• 1:27:57
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I don't know what goes on the side of that brain.
• 1:28:00
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's a hell of a read, to be honest.
• 1:28:02
  SPEAKER_01: I think people often assume I'm incredibly positive.
• 1:28:06
  SPEAKER_01: I don't always feel positive, like I'm frustrated a lot because I want to go faster and I want to make it better, and I want I it's the um Dave Brailsford.
• 1:28:14
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what are the aggregation of marginal gains we can make every day?
• 1:28:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um yeah, I I'll tell one story on the way past that.
• 1:28:23
  SPEAKER_01: I was once asked just before we got we got married by a guy I work with, he's like, You have the inability to be satisfied by anything.
• 1:28:30
  SPEAKER_01: How confident are you you're gonna stay married?
• 1:28:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, I I can't believe I've got away with this.
• 1:28:34
  SPEAKER_01: There's enough of a margin of like, I cannot believe I got to marry my wife that I don't think I'm ever gonna think that that stacks up.
• 1:28:41
  SPEAKER_01: So Helen, I love you.
• 1:28:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um so, in terms of my motivation, I love that what we do has a positive impact, and I want and it needs to matter, but my day-to-day drive is more about the people I work with and the business we get to build than it is innately nature and climate.
• 1:29:01
  SPEAKER_01: Like I love it, is that, and I love it's positively that.
• 1:29:04
  SPEAKER_01: But if I can create a place where each of the people that comes loves what they do, they're succeeding, and they can do that on a day-to-day basis.
• 1:29:12
  SPEAKER_01: That's the thing that I get the most pleasure from.
• 1:29:14
  SPEAKER_01: When you ask me what I'm most proud of about the business, it is the people that are in it and that we've attracted and the culture we've built, more so than the change of state on the ground.
• 1:29:24
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I get both, which is why it's a very people ask me, you know, how are you?
• 1:29:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I say I'm living the dream because I literally am.
• 1:29:32
  SPEAKER_01: I can go to the estates, I can see the impact we've had, I can but it's not me planting the trees now, it's me creating the situation where they can deliver all this impact, and that's the way I think I can do do the best thing.
• 1:29:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but the people are the bit that get me to well up or make me emotional or or really push me about the business.
• 1:29:50
  SPEAKER_03: I think it reminds me of what people say about what the most rewarding thing about being a partner in a law firm is, is that you see someone that you've mentored and trained being brought through to be a become a partner.
• 1:30:03
  SPEAKER_03: And actually, I think I'd go one step further because then you start seeing those people that you've mentored and trained start looking for the next person that they're going to mentor.
• 1:30:11
  SPEAKER_01: Where you've taught somebody something and you've seen them teach it and then teach it goosebumps when you see them coaching the same skill or thing that exactly the old start chain reaction.
• 1:30:22
  SPEAKER_01: L does it all the time.
• 1:30:23
  SPEAKER_01: I see L coaching things I coach, and it's like, yes, that makes me super proud.
• 1:30:27
  SPEAKER_01: I and I think you you guys have got a huge amount of responsibility for how this sector has improved, the talent, the credibility.
• 1:30:37
  SPEAKER_01: Because from us walking in, you've been convening, you've been sharing experiences from energy and renewables and deals and all the things that are there.
• 1:30:46
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, on behalf of me and all the companies in the sector, thank you for everything you're doing with that.
• 1:30:50
  SPEAKER_01: And it's been an absolute privilege to have you on the podcast.
• 1:30:52
  SPEAKER_03: So thank you for coming in.
• 1:30:53
  SPEAKER_03: It's been great to be here.
• 1:30:54
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.