Life after law – John Watson

Here, John reflects on his time at the firm and recounts how the simple question "Could I?" resulted in the launch of his weekly eMagazine, the Shaw Sheet.

All Ashurst partners have nerves of steel but I confess it shook me a bit when a year or two shy of my 60th birthday I received an email from the Senior Partner requesting my presence at a seminar on life after retirement. Had I inadvertently begun dozing off in meetings? Had clients begun to demand someone younger and wiser for their tax advice? It was with some nervousness that I looked at the other recipients. Fortunately they were such eminent legal luminaries that no one could possibly have wanted to lose them. Perhaps the invitation was not so sinister after all.

Actually the seminar was run by a headhunting guru who explained at length how we should go about collecting non-executive directorships. Start with charitable appointments and get some unpaid experience for a year or two and then, with a little luck and his organisation's assistance, you might make it on to a commercial board. After outlining this inspiring route to Valhalla, he asked for questions. There were not many; indeed the room was largely comatose. So to get things going he asked everyone to state their ambitions for their retirement. If he was expecting us all to talk about our ambitions for board membership he must have been sadly disappointed. "Open a restaurant”, said one. "Make wooden furniture," responded another. "Take a degree in philosophy" intoned a third. One by one the audience came out with ways of exploiting talents which they had never had the opportunity to use. And that is what retirement is about: testing underused talents or using talents in different ways. "Could I?" is the great question, and to die with it unanswered is ungrateful and wasteful.

That is how the Shaw Sheet was born. I always loved writing. I was interested in current affairs and politics. An online magazine was the answer. But not just any magazine. The world is full of political blogs, most of them fairly bigoted and uninspiring; the game was to create something a little different; also something which would draw on the lessons Ashurst had taught me over the years.

Ashurst has always been a firm with a difference, focusing on its clients' commercial needs and going well beyond the mere supply of legal services. The firm you would want at your side; that is Ashurst in a nutshell. Not for nothing did everyone from the banks to the Beatles want Martin Lampard's advice. "You have to instruct him" as one eminent merchant banker put it "otherwise he might be hired by the other side". Not for nothing did the first chairman of the London Docklands Development Corporation insist that if he was to take the job he must have Laurence Rutman as his lawyer. He was looking for something much wider than conveyancing expertise.

That broader perspective has always run through the firm and showed itself in other ways too. Tax lawyers are not generally glamour boys. They lurk among the deep technicians of the legal world, scruffy fellows with beetle brows (this of course does not apply to the ladies), puzzling late into the night over obscure statutes and endless cups of coffee. They do not often get the chance to appear in court. Imagine my excitement then when a point arose on enterprise zone trusts and a client offered to pay £10,000 if I would argue a test case on behalf of the industry in front of the Special Commissioners.

The trouble was that it would involve a lot of time and £10,000 would not begin to cover it at my charge rate, so I went to see Ian Nisse, then Managing Partner, to ask what the firm thought I should do. Needless to say his first question was how much chargeable time we were investing in earning this £10,000. I replied that it would be between £100,000 and £200,000 but that I thought that it might look rather good to take the case. "There is only one question, then" he said, after a moment's pause. "Would you enjoy doing it?" The result? I fought the case, became a solicitor advocate to argue the appeals and eventually was able to confront the astonished tax community with the picture of a firm of solicitors winning a tax case against the Revenue in the Court of Appeal without using Counsel. It certainly did not do our profile any harm.

The team which set up the Shaw Sheet was small, about half a dozen in total, with a variety of experience. It including retired City professionals; a novelist; an oil executive, and we gave very careful thought to why we were doing it. After all, there are loads of blogs out there and the published press is gradually failing. What was the point of a free weekly news magazine?

We began by asking ourselves the question Ian Nisse had asked me: "Would we enjoy it?" but the affirmative answer to that was not really enough. We needed to take a more holistic approach and to think about the gap we hoped to fill. Our conclusion was that newspapers, being short of money and not able to pay for much research, were becoming increasingly superficial. Accordingly there was room for publications which approached analysis in a different way, by using people from outside journalism who could apply their knowledge and intuition to cut to the centre of issues. In keeping with that our writer's guidelines required, and still does require that every piece should reveal something, whether fact, analysis or a new argument and leave the reader feeling that he or she had learnt something interesting.

That left us with the question of what we should call ourselves. Any marketing expert will tell you that the name is an important part of the brand and to match our aspirations we needed to name ourselves after someone who was both a distinguished writer and had big achievements in the world outside. In the end we settled on Lawrence of Arabia. It is quite unnecessary for me to praise his military achievements in the Middle East – after all we have all seen the film – but perhaps the reader will be less familiar with his astonishing abilities as a writer, not merely as the author of a brilliant standard translation of the Odyssey, but as the author of one of the most elegant passages in the English language:

"All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible."

Wow! It had to be Lawrence and as he changed his name to Shaw after his return to England, we named the Shaw Sheet in his honour. If you look very carefully at the top left corner of our banner you will see his image faintly imprinted.

The pandemic has been good to the Shaw Sheet, pushing the weekly circulation to the mid-200s and introducing new writers. We now, as part of a menu which contains comment and feature articles, cartoons and crossword, publish authoritative pieces on the statistical side of COVID, US politics and economics. It has also charted a way forward. As the debate opens on the shape of post pandemic society it is important that those with experience outside politics and the media should contribute to it. The Shaw Sheet, appearing weekly and independent of party politics, is well placed to provide a vector for such contributions and we would like to develop it into a source which others can use. So if you feel that you would like to contribute to the debate, come and write for us or help us to develop the profile of our magazine. Alternatively, of course, you can take the different course of smothering your talent, putting your feet up, watching Netflix and complaining that no one seems to be advocating your views. That is a perfectly good approach to the declining years but, let us be honest, not quite in line with what we all learned to expect of ourselves at Ashurst.