Shoosmiths senior associate Daniel Pugh shares insights on navigating M&A transactions, the impact of AI and why students should look beyond the legal details to understand the bigger picture
“You’re not just researching a legal question in isolation; you’re actually helping someone get a deal done,” says Daniel Pugh, a senior associate in Shoosmiths’ corporate team. He sits down with Legal Cheek Careers to discuss life in M&A, how law firms operate as businesses and what first-year students can be doing now to boost their chances.
Pugh entered the profession via what he describes as “the traditional route”, studying law at Newcastle University, completing his LPC at The University of Law in Liverpool and going straight into a training contract at a commercial law firm. “I was always more interested in the commercial side of law,” he recalls. Corporate work was the area Pugh enjoyed most during his TC “because you’re working with businesses or founders and usually helping them during one of their most significant moments”. He joined Shoosmiths as a corporate associate in Manchester in September 2021 and has been a senior associate since April 2025, with “the lion’s share” of his work being private M&A.
“In simple terms, I mainly help clients buy, sell, and invest in businesses,” Pugh explains. When he first started, he would generally be responsible for particular parts of a deal, such as organising the online data room used for legal due diligence. “As a senior associate, I am much more involved in the day-to-day management of the transaction as a whole,” he says. “That includes drafting and negotiating the key transaction documents, supervising the more junior members of the deal team, and keeping the client up to speed with where the various workstreams are up to and how we are doing against fees.”
One deal Pugh’s team is working on currently involves acting for a company buying a business with a bank funding part of the purchase. As lead counsel for the buyer, the team looks into the business being bought, negotiates the main acquisition documents, deals with the lender and brings in colleagues from various disciplines, including employment, tax, property and commercial. “What’s interesting as a corporate lawyer is how varied a single day can be: you might spend an hour negotiating a few points in the share purchase agreement, have a call with the client about something that came up in diligence, and then speak to the banking team or lender about funding,” he explains. For Pugh, much of the job is about “being a project manager in a legal sense”.
On the business of law, he starts with fees. “The traditional model is based on time spent,” he says, with hourly rates varying by seniority. “However, clients understandably want certainty around costs, so fixed fees and fee caps are also very common.” On a corporate deal, a fee is almost always agreed at the start based on an agreed scope of work and a set of assumptions, such as the deal completing by a certain date.
Technology, meanwhile, is “probably the biggest challenge happening in the legal profession at the moment”, Pugh notes. Lawyers are encouraged to use AI responsibly and it can save significant time on certain administrative tasks, but it shouldn’t be used for legal advice and must be checked thoroughly. Shoosmiths has rolled out Microsoft Copilot and developed Project Apollo with Microsoft, a tool built around contract review using the firm’s own playbooks and know-how. “So it is designed specifically around how we work, whereas more generalist tools need to be used with caution,” Pugh notes.
He doesn’t necessarily see it as an ‘AI versus lawyer’ question, as “someone still needs to understand what the output means, whether it’s right, and whether it makes sense for that particular client”. He’s realistic about costs too. “But if technology enables us to do something materially faster, clients are reasonably going to expect some of that benefit.” Where tech takes on more repetitive work, Pugh continues, “we need to make sure junior lawyers are still learning why something is being drafted or negotiated in a particular way rather than simply accepting what the tech tells them.”
“It’s easy to forget that a law firm is a business in exactly the same way that its clients are businesses,” he adds. When it comes to growth, Shoosmiths has identified AI, fintech and digital assets as areas of focus, involving people from different legal disciplines rather than one isolated tech team. “The long and short of it is that there has to be a client reason for doing whatever the decision is; a law firm’s growth will always be driven by client demand.” For junior lawyers, this is generally positive “because growth creates opportunities”.
Pugh explains that the split of work with in-house teams on an M&A deal “varies massively”. A large company may have in-house lawyers who know the business “much better than we ever could because they are living and breathing it every day”, but they come to external firms for additional resource and specialist transactional experience and a wider view of market practice.
When it comes to winning clients, pitches and reputation matter, but relationships are crucial. “Yes, lawyers must go out and win work, but doing a good job is probably the best kind of business development (BD) you can do,” he says. And it isn’t just a job for partners. “Especially at a firm such as ours, juniors have a much bigger part to play in BD than I probably ever realised.” The client contacts and advisers associates work with are progressing through their careers too, so staying in touch means “when it gets to the point where they are dishing out work, you are on their radar”.
So what do students tend to misunderstand about corporate law? “Probably how commercial the job actually is,” says Pugh. At university, students are largely rewarded for spotting and analysing every possible legal issue, but that’s only part of the job. “If I send a client a 10-page explanation of every technical issue without telling them what the actual risks are or what I think they should do, I’m probably not being particularly helpful.” Clients want to know what the issue is, how much it matters, what can be done about it and what he recommends.
His advice to aspiring lawyers is to concentrate on their degree while taking an interest in businesses and what’s happening commercially, rather than trying to become an expert in corporate law. “If you see that Company X bought Company Y, don’t worry about understanding the underlying legal documents, but look into the deal itself.” Why is the buyer buying? Why did the seller sell? How will the buyer make money from it?
Experience counts too, and it doesn’t have to be legal. “If you’ve worked in a pub or a shop or been involved in a university society, you’ve dealt with difficult people, deadlines, teamwork, and responsibility,” Pugh says. What matters most when applying for a vac scheme, training contract or qualifying work experience (QWE), he concludes, “is being able to explain what you’ve learned from those experiences rather than just listing them on your CV.”
Dan Pugh will be speaking at ‘First year focus: Understanding corporate law firms — with Shoosmiths’, a virtual student event taking place on Wednesday 11 November from 4pm to 6pm. Secure your place now.
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