Spotlight | Sandra Brown

If you can't poach them, join them. That was Sandra Brown's main reason for leaving Osborne Clarke in May after 27 years. With many clients outside the UK, Brown wanted to hire someone to strengthen and specialise that service. She spent a lot of time looking for the right lawyer and found them at Michelmores.

"I tried to recruit Jonathan Riley last summer," she says. That didn't happen but the two realised they would work very well together. "The obvious solution was for me to join the firm once it opened in Bristol."

Riley, who concentrates on trusts, estate planning and tax mitigation for UK and non-UK domiciled clients, was the ideal complement for Brown's trust law focus. He had taken the initiative to introduce himself four years ago and she was impressed by his skill and experience in complex structuring. ?"It is highly specialised work and it ?takes a lot of training to get people up to speed," she says.

"For most of the clients that I look after - even the ones who aren't terribly wealthy - there is some sort of international element. The world is so much smaller than it was 30 years ago and some of my more wealthy clients have significant overseas links."

Career ladder

• 1981 Articled at Burges Salmon
• 1983 Solicitor at Burges Salmon
• 1986 Solicitor at Osborne Clarke
• 1989 Promoted to partner at Osborne Clarke
• 2013 Partner at Michelmores

Brown had headed the private client practice at Osborne Clarke for 15 years by the time she decided to go - towing her clients. "I realised I was probably in the wrong place as the firm moved in a very corporate direction," she says. "I enjoyed my time there more when I was at the heart of what they did. At Michelmores I am central to what it wants to achieve.

"We're not into trying to compete with people who want to do straightforward stuff," she says. "If we're looking at getting new work in, we can add much more value if it is something where there is a complication and where more specialist advice would be useful."

Michelmores, with offices in Chancery Lane and Exeter, also ticked the location box. Bristol-based Brown liked that it was a West Country firm with a strong London presence - she was used to spending a day a week in the capital and wanted to keep that routine and resource.

However, a lot has changed and it's been a daunting transition. There are new systems to learn and clients to settle in. But Brown is encouraged by her new environment. "Everybody is keen to find ways of sharing their contacts and introduce you to their clients," she says. "That is the dynamic of a really good private client office: where people are working outside their silos and looking at the clients in a more rounded way."

Developing her new team, two of whom followed her from Osborne Clarke, and helping to establish the Bristol office are also priorities. "You need a critical mass so people can specialise in an area that is increasingly demanding," she says. "You need to know an awful lot about lots of things and to know when you need to call in somebody who has more expertise."

Well rounded

It's a giant leap from the professional world she joined in 1981. Brown cut her teeth at Burges Salmon and started in probate. "Although it was a boring six months, it got under my skin," she says. "I thought, 'I can't see myself doing probate for the next 40 years', but I then started working with the partners and Martin Mitchell, who had joined from Macfarlanes." She asked to qualify in private client and assist Mitchell.

Brown felt like "a round peg in a round hole". Becoming a lawyer, however, had been a fluke - specialising in trusts even more so.

Despite coming from a long line of teachers, including both her parents, aunts and uncles, she opted to do a practical law degree and went to Bristol University after growing up in neighbouring Wales (she was born in south-east England).

Tax, in particular, she found really interesting. "It is intellectually demanding and changes all the time," she says. "It's always a challenge to keep up to date." She studied it as an elective option and is still in touch with her lecturer. "He was able to humanise tax - and his approach was catching."

Brown had always looked forward to working, but in more of a vocation than a job, she says. "People who are good private client lawyers tend to be able to get under the skin of their clients and sense what any particular client can view as their priority.

"There is the academic side, the intellectual challenge of it, and working out how you achieve what they'd like you to achieve. But there's a huge amount of trying to empathise with where they're coming from and understanding how things work within that particular family."

Brown saw too much of what being a teacher involved, she says, and everybody knew she didn't have the bug. "Although I think there is a lot of teacher in me because I'm really into training."

Looking back to her formative years, Brown remembers assisting six different partners with conflicting ways of working. "I hated the 'wordy' styles of most and vowed to be clear, concise and unstuffy." And she quickly learned that private client lawyers must be "chameleon-like".

"I used to draft letters in their names and it would be exactly the same letter but depending on whom it was going from, it sounded completely different," she says. "When those partners retired, I was very fortunate to be in the right place at the right time and I inherited many clients."

Being fearless helped too. "I wasn't scared of having to go off and try to work out what we needed to do," she says, "and I suppose that stays with you. If there is a difficult issue and you eventually find a way round it, that's how you gain in confidence.

"If you're prepared to take a look at what's going on around you and get under the skin of clients, if you're motivated and driven and you are able to get people to stick to you, most partners would be very happy to pass onto assistants those clients who were very happy working with them."

Dragons' den

So what key advice would Brown give her younger self? "Not to worry about things," she says. "Clients value that peace of mind. You know what the issue is and you're going to help them sort it out. That's what makes them loyal to you." These days she's a "constructive worrier", concerned about compliance issues, what will happen with inheritance tax and certain issues clients had been able to park but are now having to deal with.

Beyond work Brown's Welsh roots remain important - she still knows the language, albeit a little rusty, after her bilingual upbringing of speaking English to her mum and Welsh to her dad. And she enjoys going "back over the [Severn] Bridge" namely to see her beloved Ospreys play in Swansea. Brown is fanatical about rugby, even flying the Welsh flag in the office when her team beat England.

She is also passionate about her new position as head of Michelmores' Bristol private client department. "I don't know what I'd do if I didn't do this," she reflects. "I'd be very tedious if you left me at home all day."

Not that this love for practising law has inspired her two daughters. She recently asked one of them, who is studying English and theatre studies, what she'd like to do after graduating. "She said rather dismissively: 'If I can't think of anything else, I could always do what you do, Mum!'"

Jennifer Palmer-Violet is acting editor of Private Client Adviser