I have now become head of the department. The jury is out as to whether this says more about my leadership skills or my team's ability to look after themselves.

After courting for a couple of years to check out each other's bad habits, Lupton Fawcett and I decided to take the plunge and I became a partner.

After 8 years on loan to Arla Foods I returned to Lupton Fawcett as part of the intellectual property and commercial team. Just as my background in private practice was of great benefit at Arla, I am now able to put my experience and learnings from being on the inside to good use when advising clients, particularly when it comes to considerations which are not of a purely legal nature.I focus particularly on intellectual property issues, enjoying working in a team alongside impressive specialists in this area. I assist with obtaining, exploiting and arguing about all forms of IP, often in relation to matters with complex legal or factual issues and significant strategic importance and consequences.I also continue to undertake a broad range of more general commercial work, from drafting and negotiation of many forms of contract to compliance with various legal requirements relating to marketing and other commercial dealings.

Arla is one of the world’s largest fast-moving consumer goods companies, operating in the dairy sector with a turnover in excess of £2bn in the UK and €10bn globally. My precise role evolved during my time there, culminating in being the sole lawyer in the UK, working in a global legal department alongside Danish, Swedish and German lawyers and reporting to the group general counsel in Denmark.An in-house lawyer’s role is inevitably varied, particularly when there is a small legal presence in such a large organisation, and I got involved right across the business from strategy to nitty-gritty, adverts to contracts, and products to ways of working. I particularly enjoyed my involvement in the marketing work, supporting Arla’s many brands including Lurpak, Anchor and Cravendale. My compliance function also included my appointment as the global anti-bribery compliance officer, following which I created, implemented and managed a completely new comprehensive anti-bribery policy and associated procedures across all of Arla’s worldwide operations.Whilst I was often a legal one-man-band, particularly on UK matters, I had close relationships with other areas of the business. I was a member of the UK finance leadership team, performed company secretarial duties for Arla's UK companies, and worked in cross-functional teams on specific projects. When Arla decided to build the world’s largest fresh milk dairy, I had sole internal responsibility for all legal aspects, joining the project team before the site had even been identified and then navigating a vast array of legal issues and contracts along the way.

I worked in the commercial law group which had a particular emphasis on intellectual property, and I was very fortunate to have two partners prepared to give me their expert tuition in the field. I covered the full range from managing trade mark and design right portfolios, through negotiating various types of IP-related agreements, to obtaining urgent injunctions and running lengthy court battles. The subject matter was similarly broad, from knitting to gay club nights, fishing equipment to celebrity footballer endorsement, and relaxing spa baths to a successful reported case about a patent for chilling your beer. I also handled other non-contentious commercial work, both commonplace and esoteric, and compliance work relating to e-commerce and marketing. In the middle of my time here I took a 6-month career break to travel around the world, visiting Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, America, Mexico (for the day) and Graceland.

Upon qualification as a solicitor I joined the Leeds office of national firm Cobbetts in their commercial and intellectual property department, where I first developed the habit of being given all the weird and wonderful issues that didn’t quite fit anywhere else. I was mainly handling general commercial contracts and specialist intellectual property ones, together with a smattering of corporate work both in a supporting capacity handling due diligence and disclosure and as the lead lawyer on smaller matters such as setting up joint ventures.

I did my training contract at an international firm then called Hammond Suddards Edge, moving around their offices in Leeds, Manchester, London and also Munich, where I operated in the German language as the only Englishman there.