Shakespeare Martineau lawyer Lisa Botterill was one of the very few female corporate partners in the Leicester area. Here, she discusses her career, including her most memorable deals:
“My dad was an accountant and partner at KPMG, but maths wasn’t really my thing so I decided to go into law instead, which was the other revered profession at the time. Having studied languages, I was good with words, although as a corporate lawyer, an understanding of accounts is important so I do still have to deal with numbers as part of my job.
I studied law at the University of Warwick, before completing my Legal Practice Court at De Montfort University. Corporate law and litigation interested me as a trainee, but I didn’t enjoy my litigation seat and I used to dread going to court – you never knew how the judge was going to react.
During my training contract, I moved firms to guarantee that I would at least try corporate work during my training and I loved it. It’s hard to put my finger on exactly what, but I really enjoyed working with businesses and their owners to help them achieve their goals, the wide variety of work that falls into corporate and, in particular, being involved in deals.
The first deal I completed from start to finish was, funnily enough, for a company my husband now works for. It was the sale of a business called Rigid Containers to Belgium-owned VPK Packaging.
There were lots of shareholders – more than 100 of them – so the deal had to be carefully structured to sweep up all the selling shareholders, rather than a traditional share purchase. It’s still the only deal of its kind I’ve been involved in and it was a really interesting transaction.
As a trainee, I worked for a maverick partner. I learned a lot from him – how to do things, as well as observing how not to approach things in some cases. It was a real baptism of fire and very much sink or swim, but I learned a great deal in a short space of time.
I learned a lot from working on the job. But as I was very much thrown in the deep end, I made some mistakes along the way. However, I learned from them and never made them again as a result.
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My most memorable deals were in 2006. I’d been qualified for five years, so I was gaining in experience but still keen to learn and experience different things. They were both based in Manchester, so involved numerous trips to the North West to negotiate.
The first was the biggest deal I’d worked on – the client told us we needed to complete from start to finish in a month, which, with a lot of hard work and late nights, we managed to achieve.
On the second, we were acting for a really good local business, but it was very complicated because they were only buying part of the target company so it needed reorganising beforehand.
At 9pm, the night before completion, the client was divvying up responsibilities for the transaction and decided I was going to deal with the supply agreement, but I’d never done one before as technically it falls under commercial law.
However, it turned out that the skills I’d built up enabled me to crack on and deal with the agreement. Apparently my face was a picture when it was delegated to me, but I do thrive under pressure and that was certainly one of those occasions.
Leicester is my home city and it’s where I’ve always worked. I know it very well and I have good connections here, but I am also lucky to be able to work with clients nationwide. One of the best things about working with clients locally is you can see the impact of the deals you’ve been involved with because you live among them.
Local people tend to want local advisers. There’s always been a lot of really good quality lawyers in the Leicester market who are capable of doing great work – you don’t need London or Birmingham advisers as you can get an excellent job done locally.
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Post-Covid, I think there may be now a slight shift to more of an East Midlands market, but that’s been on the cards for a number of years. However, the challenge is that Leicester regularly loses talent to the lure of the bigger cities like London and Birmingham, which has been the case throughout my career.
I trained at Harvey Ingram and then joined Shakespeares 11 years later, which eventually merged with Harvey Ingram in 2012. I felt like I’d ended up back where I started so I took a leap of faith and moved client-side.
It was a massive eye opener and a very good learning experience, but I knew it wasn’t a long-term option. I moved to Nelsons for more than three years, but decided having experienced a few different opportunities that had come my way, Shakespeare Martineau was where I wanted to build my career and grow, so in 2017, I re-joined the firm.
Having experienced other firms and client-side, there’s no place like home and I’m proud to say I work for the best firm in Leicester.
We have a fantastic group of partners where everyone works together seamlessly. We trust each other and we look after each other’s clients, which has made us successful. We are on a growth journey, which creates more opportunities to work with new people, and we are constantly learning. It’s a very exciting time.”