Reed Smith’s London managing partner Brigid North on languages, what real estate has to offer and curiosity in the legal profession
Brigid North, now London managing partner at Reed Smith, never set out to be a lawyer. She originally won a place to study French and German at Queen’s University Belfast but, concerned about the political climate at the time, her parents encouraged her to rethink her plans. Instead, after a teacher suggested she combine her aptitude for languages with law, she switched to the University of Nottingham to study law with French.
At Nottingham she studied the two side by side, even spending a year in Bordeaux immersed in French law. It was tough. “I couldn’t do it again,” she jokes. But she came away with a qualifying English law degree and a sharper sense of communication and cultural adaptability. Those skills, she says, have proved invaluable not just in a global practice but in the profession more broadly.
With no lawyers in the family, finding a training contract became her personal mission. North deliberately targeted mid-sized international firms, the ones taking 20 to 40 trainees a year, where she thought she would fit in. That approach led her to Richards Butler, a boutique international outfit that later merged into Reed Smith. “All firms look pretty similar from the outside, but they suit people very differently,” she explains. She has stayed ever since, through every merger and tie-in, because each change brought new people and new opportunities to learn.
At first, she thought shipping was her future. She even spent six months in Reed Smith’s Paris office working on maritime cases, including arranging to arrest ships off West Africa. But back in London, her third seat was in real estate and something just “clicked”. She loved the clients, the practical problems they brought with them, and the mentoring she received from a partner in the department. A final seat in corporate rounded things out, but by then the decision was made: she qualified into the firm’s real estate practice.
The irony is not lost on her. “I really hated land law at university,” she quips. But in practice, it turned out to be far richer and more varied than the dry, blackletter version in textbooks. Today she advises on development projects ranging from office towers and skyscrapers to wind farms, while also acting for tenants and lenders on everything from student housing to senior living. The secret, she says, is a strong foundation of legal knowledge that allows you to adapt to whatever the market throws at you.
Her day-to-day is anything but predictable. One morning might be spent puzzling through an 1820s title deed, “like a jigsaw puzzle,” she says, before switching to drafting creative contract clauses. “Templates only get you so far,” she continues. “Every deal is a little different, so you can’t just coast on boilerplate.” And when it all comes together, the payoff is worth it. Nothing beats that “exciting completion day drama when millions of pounds change hands and every piece of the deal finally falls into place,” North says.
She has been part of plenty of high-profile projects. One of her earliest was the redevelopment of Battersea Power Station. As a junior she helped with early planning while preservation groups fretted about the fate of the chimneys. “It was never our clients’ plan to pull them down,” she recalls. Seeing the finished site last year, long after her clients’ involvement, she was taken aback. “It’s a fantastic development, which doesn’t even feel like it’s from the UK — it has a much more international vibe.”
Looking at the wider market, North sees both challenges and opportunities — and sustainability now topping the agenda. Every new office or development must have green credentials and a low carbon footprint. “It’s wonderful to see,” she says. But politics and economics can spook investors. Real estate, she explains, often acts like a “canary in the coal mine” when uncertainty strikes and events such as Brexit or unexpected government budgets have made some overseas developers hesitate. “We have our work cut out to keep attracting capital to this country,” she admits, although money is still flowing in.
When markets wobble, her role is to keep the legal side watertight, not to lecture clients on business strategy — “the clients have got that covered,” she says. Instead, she draws on her experience to flag hidden pitfalls, especially in long-running property deals where clauses could be tripped by an election or a mini-budget. In short, she provides foresight, spotting the traps before they spring.
It is not her first experience of shocks. The 2008 financial crash, the Brexit vote and other sudden economic jolts all taught her the same lesson: predicting the future with precision is impossible. She remembers 2008 as “scary” when nobody knew what anything was worth and financing froze. For her, the key takeaway was that markets will always stumble from time to time and that flexibility and agility are what is needed when it comes to property law.
One constant throughout has been the firm itself, and for North the reason is culture. Even in the Richards Butler days she found the environment supportive and unfussy, and Reed Smith’s London office remains, in her words, “as non-hierarchical as it’s possible to get” in big law, where titles like partner and associate inevitably exist. North recalls bumping into a former trainee at a crowded station, where they immediately recognised each other and stopped for a catch-up — a sign, she says, of how partners remember juniors years later. The firm also encourages entrepreneurial drive, with many of her early clients starting out as fledgling businesses she advised from the beginning; in a way, she and her clients grew together. “It has been a privilege to follow clients’ pivots and their evolution,” she says.
This year she became London managing partner, a big step that moved her beyond client work into media interviews, strategic planning, and leading hundreds of colleagues in the Reed Smith’s largest office. Some aspects have pushed her out of her comfort zone, but she relishes the challenge. “Being a lawyer is great because you’re always learning new things,” she says, and this role takes that learning to the next level. She is also proud of Reed Smith’s global model: with a single profit pool worldwide, “London works in step with the rest of our network and international collaboration runs seamlessly”.
What advice does she have for juniors looking to follow her path? Curiosity is top of North’s list. Trainees who simply complete tasks and file them away do not stand out. The best ones, she says, go further, perhaps handing in a draft client email with suggestions or questions flagged, neatly packaged for review. It shows they are thinking ahead and saves everyone time. The hallmark of a great junior is being “user-friendly” and anticipating what the client or partner will need rather than just “churning out work”.
And what about that old favourite, “commercial awareness”? North laughs. As a student she once proudly wrote on an application that she had “good commercial nous”. Looking back, she says, “how could I possibly have claimed that?” Her advice is simpler: take an interest in the world, read the news, and say yes to opportunities. Real commercial sense comes with experience, not from ticking a box or memorising FT headlines.
Her final message is not to let rejection derail you. Training contracts are fiercely competitive, and even the brightest candidates can flop in interviews. She herself had plenty of “catastrophic” ones. The trick, she insists, is to treat every setback as a lesson. Adjust, keep going, and eventually you will succeed.
For its part, Reed Smith offers a variety of routes into the profession through its SQE trainee path and its apprenticeship scheme for school leavers, which launched in October this year.
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