Allen & Overy

Paul Sephton

Barcelona, Barclays and football....

Barcelona
As much as I love my job it's always nice to get away once in a while, so this year I headed off for a week in the sun to Barcelona. I'd never been before and was pretty excited about the combination of vibrant city and beach, but the day before I went disaster struck when I ruined my back wakeboarding. I was in so much pain for the whole trip it was ridiculous! Fortunately this played to my advantage as it meant that I could dispense with the sightseeing and spend my time sitting on the beach, eating and drinking. Champion. Towards the end of the week I was able to be a bit more adventurous and so my fiancée and I visited the Sagrada Familia (nice cathedral) and a few other Gaudi places (largely boring) and, most excitingly of all, the Camp Nou football stadium (my fiancée may have a different opinion on how much of a highlight this really was!).

“It's been an interesting job which has allowed me to get involved with the marketing side of things which is clearly very important to the firm.”

Barclays Relationship Building
Following my secondment to Barclays which ended earlier this year, I've been given the role of Barclays relationship associate which means that I'm tasked with, among other things, monitoring our contact with key clients at Barclays Commercial Bank. It's been an interesting job which has allowed me to get involved with the marketing side of things which is clearly very important to the firm. As part of this initiative I am shortly going to do an interview for Allen & Overy News about the role which will unfortunately be seen by every member of A&O around the world (approximately one million people, I would estimate). I am not looking forward to this, particularly as I'm still receiving stick from "friends" who have seen the video that accompanies this blog.

Party time in Canary Wharf
In the past few weeks A&O hosted a party for its Canary Wharf based clients, which, as far as I'm aware, is the first time that this has been done. As you can imagine with so many big banks down in the Wharf these days, it was a fairly large event. I'm not normally a huge fan of events where there is a large crowd of people all smoozing away but this one was actually really good fun. It was great to catch up with people that I was on secondment with at Barclays and also to see clients from Credit Suisse and HSBC that I work with regularly.  Having said this, I'm not sure how chuffed they were to see me towards the end of evening when, in a particularly dapper moment, I managed to clear out a full bottle of red wine whilst reaching for some crisps.  I'm hopeful that this went largely unnoticed and didn't ruin anyone's evening or willingness to instruct A&O!

Partners v Associates
I recently organised a 5-aside football match which pitched the Canary Wharf partners against the Canary Wharf associates (age against beauty, essentially). The build up to the match was intense with predictions and 'big talk' echoing around the office. The match itself was a cagey affair with neither side wanting to give anything away in the opening stages but as the match wore on the superior fitness of the young gun associates began to tell and a gap of 5 - 1 opened up.  However, the partners fighting spirit quickly emerged and they valiantly fought back to tie the scores at 5 - 5.  This forced the associates into action and after a hard fought end of the game the associates finished on top by a narrow margin of 8 - 7. The partners insisted that they had some sort of moral victory but we associates were happy to take the actual victory with us to the pub. A rematch is on the cards before Christmas….

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