Womble Bond Dickinson partner Neil Long discusses his career
“I was probably like the majority in having no clear idea what I wanted to do career-wise,” says Neil Long, head of Womble Bond Dickinson’s private capital team. With no family background in law or business, there was little in the way of industry guidance. Lacking, as he puts it, “much imagination at the time”, he took a job at NatWest, working in a division that dealt with private client legal issues, investment management and personal wealth. Beyond the fact that it offered “okay pay”, Long admits he didn’t really know what any of it meant when he started.
It didn’t take long to realise the investment side wasn’t for him. What did grab his attention was the “legal structures underpinning it all” — the trusts, the wills, and the way law translates messy human facts into something that can move wealth, businesses and assets through generations. That interest ultimately nudged him towards qualification as a solicitor.
A paralegal role in a private client team came next. It gave “really broad exposure” to the work and helped him pin down what he actually enjoyed about it. “I figured out that actually I quite liked that the work is ultimately to do with being able to make a difference to real people’s lives,” Long says. Private client, he adds, is “Marmite”. You’ll know if it’s for you or not!
Some lawyers thrive on the “cut and thrust” of the corporate world: big deals, massive teams, and projects that run around the clock. If that’s your thing, “fill your boots”. But if what really motivates you is seeing the direct impact of your advice on individuals and families, then private client work is well worth serious consideration. That’s the view of Long, who joined Bond Dickinson as a partner in 2015, before the firm merged with a US outfit in 2017 to form Womble Bond Dickinson.
Long is also keen to challenge the lingering idea that private client is somehow small fry. He points to the sheer size of the market, including consumer legal services spend, and stresses that private client work “isn’t to be dismissed”. The range is huge, from “high street wills through to high-end, technical, international work for globally mobile clients”. And at the top end, the conversations can feel very different to corporate practice. “Rather than dealing primarily with in-house legal teams, you’re talking to the business owners, the entrepreneurs and the people that are making a difference… you’re talking at shareholder level,” says Long.
Over time, Long’s practice developed more and more into private wealth disputes. “It’s everything to do with wealth moving through generations” — wills, trusts, financial abuse, undue influence, predatory marriages, and the controversies that can erupt around where money is going and why. In those situations, Long says it falls on the lawyer to bring “clarity and certainty and definition and de-escalation”.
If that sounds intense, it is. It’s also what makes the best moments feel genuinely rewarding. “The best moments are normally where after putting in effort, you achieve some kind of resolution,” Long says. These matters often involve “personalities, feelings, and emotions” and can be “very emotionally challenging” for clients, especially where the dispute is with a family member. When you reach a point where a client can accept an outcome, get closure and move on, “it’s very rewarding”.
Interestingly, Long is wary of treating court wins as the gold standard. “I don’t want to say winning in court,” he tells me, because he “tends to think of it as being a bit of a failure if you end up in court” on these types of matters. Trials are public, stressful, and “not a healthy situation for anybody”, even if, as he wryly acknowledges, “it is more lucrative for lawyers”. His answer to people who ask how he operates in a world where everything is controversial is simple: “Th controversy already exists; I’m trying to make it better.”
So what does a working week look like? In short, nothing like sitting behind a desk all day. Long gives me a snapshot from the past week alone.
There’s the urgent case of a wealthy individual who suffered a stroke without having made a power of attorney, meaning his business and personal affairs “suddenly just came to a halt”. Long made an application to the Court of Protection to become his deputy, so he had authority “to pick up the pieces and put it back together”. That included heading out on a site visit to look around the premises and the client’s home.
Then there’s the international estates work. Long had a strategy call with his team and Swiss lawyers on an administration involving assets in Switzerland, Liechtenstein and the UK, and a complicated split between what passes to a daughter and what passes to a Liechtenstein foundation. And then we get to Tuesday, which, in classic private client fashion, involves both castles and Christmas lunch.
“On Tuesday, I was in the north of England, where I toured around a client’s estate,” Long tells me. Not a weekend National Trust job either. It’s “a big, fairly ancient, landed estate” with “groundbreaking house building development work going on” to fund repairs to the castle and other ancient buildings. The idea is essentially to build and sell houses to keep the estate standing.
The project is “really challenging due to the greenbelt restrictions”, so Long drove around to get a grip on what was happening on the ground. And he’s not just advising from the sidelines. “I am a trustee of that, so I’ve got responsibility for that work and responsibility to the beneficiaries. Are we looking after that asset wisely? Are we making sensible decisions?”
“Straight after that,” Long continues, he took a client to lunch, “a well-known business owner up in the Northeast”, for a Christmas meal. This is a long-standing relationship. “He is a really great client of ours and we look after him and his family and all their trusts.” It’s a neat illustration of what private client looks like at the relationship-heavy end of the market — part technical expertise, part long-term stewardship, and part being a steady presence across years and generations.
That relationship aspect comes up repeatedly when I ask what skills matter most. “Do you find it easy to build strong relationships? Can you be honest and direct without being rude? Can you be calm and unflappable?” Long says. “Nobody needs aggression in these circumstances; you need to find a way through.”
Even where matters aren’t contentious, you’re still advising people through sensitive, life-defining decisions: relocations, family planning, wills, education choices, and all the “what if someone died in that process” scenarios that clients don’t always like to say out loud. Unlike corporate work where the legal team can “come and go”, private client lawyers can look after the “whole family across generations”, sometimes families a firm has acted for several hundred years.
For trainees, that proximity to clients comes early. Long says there’s “a lot of client contact from day one”: sitting in on meetings, taking notes, and drafting wills, trusts and powers of attorney. On the disputes side, trainees might help with obtaining and reviewing medical records, drafting first versions of letters of claim, preparing court documents, and drafting briefs to counsel. There’s also an emphasis on building networks early: conferences, seminars, and business development. Private client is often a referral-driven world spanning tax advisers, accountants, investment managers and private banks.
To finish, I ask for the one piece of advice he think a young lawyer starting out should hear. It’s a “package of things”, Long says. “Be curious, ask questions, work hard, and pay attention to detail. If you do those things, you should do okay.” And private client itself? After years in the sector, his view is upbeat. It’s “on the up and up”, driven by global mobility, tax changes and increasingly complex family structures. While AI might speed up some processes, he sees the “human interaction” at the heart of the work as “pretty secure”.
Neil Long will speaking at ‘Private wealth and the law — with Womble Bond Dickinson’, a virtual student event taking place on Wednesday 14 January. Apply Now.
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