Why this Big Law lawyer swapped London for the BVI

Time for a change

A legal career had been on Weston’s radar from an early age. His father was a shipping lawyer who had previously worked in the Merchant Navy before setting up his own practice in Felixstowe, where Weston spent school holidays helping out.

After university, Weston completed a law conversion and joined Paul Hastings, where he worked for seven years.

By the time he reached the mid-level associate stage, Weston was starting to question the traditional Big Law trajectory.

“I think there’s a point you get to as a mid-level associate where you start to consider all the pros and cons of Big Law,” he said.

...you start to consider all the pros and cons of Big Law.

The strong compensation and interesting work were increasingly being weighed against “the demands it places on your health, your body, your relationships”.

A secondment at J.P. Morgan convinced him that moving in-house was not the answer, while switching to another major law firm seemed unlikely to provide a meaningful change.

Around that time, he received a call from a headhunter who offered an altogether different option.

“He said, ‘Do you want to move to the BVI or Cayman?’”

Taking the leap

As an international corporate lawyer in London, Weston had encountered BVI entities on cross-border transactions, but he had never visited the Caribbean and did not know anyone who had made the move.

Harneys emerged as the strongest prospect and invited him to visit the island as part of its recruitment process, covering his flights and a couple of nights in a hotel.

Flying prospective recruits out to the BVI was standard practice at the time, although sadly it’s one perk that has since disappeared.

He paid to extend the trip himself and told colleagues that he was going on holiday to Antigua, reasoning that he needed a plausible explanation for both the absence and the suntan.

If I don’t give this a go, I will always regret it.

On his final evening, watching the sunset, Weston considered what would happen if he turned the opportunity down.

“If I don’t give this a go, I will always regret it,” he remembered thinking. “I’ll be sat there in my office in London for the next 15, 20 years thinking, why wasn’t I a little bit braver?”

When Harneys made him an offer, he accepted.

Starting again

Moving to the BVI also meant adjusting to a new legal system, despite arriving with several years of London corporate experience behind him.

“At 30 years old, after a few years in London, you think you’re a hotshot and you know everything, but you really don’t,” he said.

Clients could previously ask him a question and expect an immediate answer.

“You go from a client asking you a question and knowing the answer straight away to saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’m going to have to get back to you. I’m going to have to check. I’m going to have to speak to a partner.’”

“You think you know everything about corporate law, but you just know a very small part of it,” he said.

A different seat

The role of an offshore lawyer within a transaction was also different. At Paul Hastings, he had been accustomed to working at the centre of deals that could generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees and thousands of hours of work.

In the BVI, Harneys was often one component of a much larger international transaction, responsible for advising on the BVI entities involved rather than running the deal itself.

“You go from being lead counsel on the deal and at the heart of everything to being in very much a support role,” he said.

Learning to operate effectively in that position meant understanding when offshore counsel was genuinely needed rather than trying to replicate the role he had played in London.

“The job isn’t to be on every call. It isn’t to understand everything. It’s to understand what your role is and what people need from you to get the deal done.”

At the same time, the move gave him earlier exposure to aspects of running a legal practice that had largely remained outside his remit at Paul Hastings such as billing, quoting and business development.

Does it get boring?

One of the common concerns among lawyers considering the move is whether offshore work will provide the same intellectual challenge.

Weston remembers one of the now senior associates raising exactly that concern during the recruitment process after being warned that moving offshore could mean spending the next decade doing little more than preparing board minutes.

His own experience quickly challenged that perception. Soon after arriving, Weston was working on the $1.35 billion merger of logistics companies UTi Worldwide and DSV, one of the largest takeovers of a publicly listed BVI company at the time.

Harneys acted as BVI counsel to UTi, instructed by Cravath in New York. It was the largest merger Weston had worked on in his career up to that point.

“I was fresh off the plane and they asked me if I could take over on it,” he said.

The work can vary considerably. A lawyer might work alongside some of the world’s leading law firms on a sophisticated cross-border transaction, then advise a founder establishing a company or raising outside capital for the first time.

That range requires moving between very different levels of commercial and legal sophistication.