Imagine that you’ve reached the peak of your profession. That you’ve been described as “a star of the property bar” by Who’s Who Legal. That the 2017 Chambers UK Guide said that you remain “the top-ranked silk in the Real Estate Litigation Bar”, in “a league of [your] own” with an “outstanding brain”.
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The temptation might be to take things easy, perhaps even turn your thoughts towards early retirement. Not if you’re Nick Dowding QC. Instead, last year, after more than 35 years at Falcon Chambers, Dowding left in pursuit of a “new challenge”. He found it at Malcolm Hollis (MH) – and life as the firm’s in-house barrister is clearly treating him well.
“Do you know, I’m enjoying life hugely,” he says. “I am having a lot of fun. I’m not going to pretend that it hasn’t been without its challenges – there were things about life in a corporate firm that I hadn’t seen coming.
“But it’s a really nice place to work for much the same reasons that Falcon Chambers was a nice place to work. There is a real sense of people working together, of a professional family, of team support – I am very lucky to find that again and frankly, to put it shortly, I’ve acquired a new lease of life.”
The fresh challenge
Dowding is quick to clarify that life at the self-employed bar had not become less challenging: “If anything, the opposite was the case but I had been in, more or less, every possible court; I had appeared for almost every possible client – the good, the bad and the ugly. I wanted to see what else I could do… where else I could take my skills.”
Another key factor was getting the work/life balance right. “I was really working all hours for many, many years. Although I very much enjoyed being in court, I don’t think many people appreciate quite how much time and energy and weekends and small hours of the morning go into preparing a big witness action or a big appeal.
“I was looking for a little more balance between work and play, as it were, and I think I found both of those things at Malcolm Hollis.”
It’s hard to believe much time is left for play as Dowding lists his various roles at the firm. There’s his “external facing role”, giving advice to MH’s corporate clients on property law matters, and his “internal facing role”, advising its surveyors on matters that they are working on.
Then, working closely with Vivien King (MH’s other in-house legal consultant), he offers training for the company’s personnel on recent legal developments and key issues.
In addition, he continues to act as an arbitrator or independent expert in resolving legal disputes, gives external lectures and talks “under the Malcolm Hollis umbrella” and, while it’s not part of his MH functions, finds time to keep up his book writing and book editing.
“We have just published the 6th edition of the dilapidations book [Dilapidations: The Modern Law and Practice, which he co-authored] and I remain a joint editor of Woodfall: Landlord and Tenant,” he said.
Lawyers and surveyors
Since formally joining the firm last summer, he has enjoyed some of the “good-humoured banter” that exists between the legal and surveying professions, including the “usual stereotypes” that lawyers are stuffy, unapproachable, not always rooted in the commercial realities and inclined to treat things as questions of broad legal principle.
“I think if there is a conception or misconception that’s perhaps the biggest,” he says. “It’s the old joke: if you put two lawyers in a room you are going to get at least three answers, if not more.”
Lawyers, in turn, perhaps assume that surveyors are overly practical people who “spend all their time up a ladder, in a boiler room or at an estate agent’s office looking at comparables”, not appreciating the considerable amount of thinking and research that goes into finalising a surveyor’s report or opinion.
But, in the end, “good-natured banter” is all it is: “Like all stereotypes, there’s a grain of truth but I think both professions are highly skilled and I think we recognise that we contribute equally to the cases in which we are jointly involved.”
Lord Neuberger
When conversation turns to Lord Neuberger’s retirement as president of the Supreme Court last year, Dowding speaks warmly of his friend and long-time professional colleague.
“We do indeed go back a very long way,” he says. “I started in 1980 and, when I got there, Lord Neuberger was a very, very young man. We shared a room together in Falcon Chambers for some years and I remember that as some of my happiest times at the bar. We shared a joint love of Sherlock Holmes, vying with each other to quote the longest passages from the stories we could think of, and Rumpole of the Bailey. We had a joint love of practical jokes on, as they then seemed, very elderly silks.
“We were eventually, for reasons of behaviour or otherwise, banished to a Chambers annexe which was promptly christened ‘The Gulag,’ where we remained for a few more years until we had done our time and were recalled for good behaviour.”
When not joking or quoting Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, they spent much of their early years doing Rent Act possession work, back in a “more hit-and-miss” era with no skeleton arguments or witness statements, sparse pleadings and judges who “were of varying ability and not always terribly nice”.
Dowding believes that, in his lifetime, property law has “acquired a much more substantial status”. When he started, it wasn’t the area to specialise in “if you wanted to be a high-flyer”, but it’s come a long way since.
And he feels that Lord Neuberger’s elevation to the highest levels of the judiciary has played a part in raising real estate’s profile, adding: “Perhaps, dare one say, it has resulted in more property law cases reaching the appellate court. It may or may not, for example, be a coincidence that the Marks and Spencer case [Marks & Spencer plc v BNP Paribas Securities Services Trust Co (Jersey) Ltd [2015] UKSC 72; [2016] EGLR 8], which is now the leading case on implied terms, was a property law case and not a commercial law case.”
He is anxious not to exaggerate his friend’s impact though, and believes the field is in good hands with the current judiciary, many of whom have “huge property law expertise”. He doesn’t feel Lord Neuberger’s retirement will have any effect on the quality of judgments in this area, but adds: “It is a little bit difficult not to see it as the passing of an era”.
Dowding, however, has no judicial aspirations: “I was privileged enough to be appointed as a deputy High Court judge, although I tried very few cases. In fact, I only tried one long contested witness action. I did enjoy it. I don’t think I enjoyed it enough for it to be a full-time job.”
Aside from the “terror” he experienced at being seated by the usher in court – “I went to the sort of school where it was thought terribly amusing to pull your chair away just as you were about to sit down” – more seriously, he thinks he would miss the regular interaction with clients and colleagues, the “rough and tumble of life on the front line”.
Instead, he enjoys his arbitration and independent expert work, which can occupy part of his professional life, but not the whole of it.
He hopes arbitration will increase in prominence, believing that we have an “almost perfect model” in the rent review field that could be translated to deal with other disputes: “I’ve never seen why arbitration shouldn’t work equally well, and indeed independent expert determination as well, in other fields, particularly dilapidations.”
KitKat and Orion
But enough about work. After all, Dowding made the leap to MH in search of work/life balance. And so it’s only fair to offer a paragraph or two to a couple of his other passions.
First there’s KitKat – “a fiercely independent minded chestnut cob with short legs and a rather large bottom,” with whom Dowding hacks around the forests and fields of the Suffolk countryside, occasionally returning with some minor injury, to the “vast amusement” of his new colleagues.
Then there’s Orion – “an elderly, very elderly actually, but not as quite elderly as me, long keel yacht” which he keeps on the River Orwell and on which he takes the odd venture across to the continent or up and down the east coast. “Both of them keep me sane,” he says. “I’m tempted to say both of them keep me young, but certainly both of them keep me on my toes.”
Relaxed, engaging and good-humoured, whether he’s talking about dilapidations, equestrianism or life on the ocean waves, Dowding carries the air of a man very happy with his lot – one who has found what he went looking for.
To send feedback, e-mail jess.harrold@egi.co.uk or tweet @jessharrold or @estatesgazette
