For Keith Oliver, growing older means never having to wake up with a black-eye ever again.
The senior partner of renowned white collar crime law firm Peters & Peters, remembers acting for Kevin Maxwell, son of rotund newspaper publisher and fraudster, Robert Maxwell.
“I remember waking up in the middle of the night, in the middle of the Maxwell case, with a black eye because I sat bolt upright with a thought in my head and hit my cupboard or something.”
The case, in which Oliver represented Kevin Maxwell against charges related to his father plundering Mirror Group Newspapers’ pension fund for millions, was 20 years ago.
But Oliver is in a reflective mood. He has decided after serving as Peters & Peters’ senior partner since 2005, to stand down and return to fee-earning as the firm’s head of international.
On 1 October, he will hand over the reins to head of business crime, and possibly the funniest person to ever take part in The Lawyer’s much-missed Work Life Quiz, Michael O’Kane.
As of this month, Oliver has notched up 36 years as a qualified lawyer after joining Peters & Peters as a mere slip of a 21-year-old trainee in 1978.
“The lesson I’ve learned after 30-odd years of practice is that I’m not intimated by problems nowadays,” he says.
Oliver admits he used to worry, hence the ocular-terror of the Maxwell years. However, these days while cases are “challenging and difficult”, he says: “I’ve learned to deal with today’s problems today. You can’t solve everything in one day.”
Oliver is also looking back on the last four years since he featured in The Lawyer Hot 100 2012.
The firm has evolved so now 60 per cent of its work is international. Civil fraud specialist Oliver is working on “two huge new cases” in Dubai.
But don’t expect Peters & Peters to start opening new offices all over the place – it values its relationships with major law firms too much.
Peters & Peters is a go-to firm when, for example, a magic circle giant is conflicted out of a white collar crime case.
On Dubai, he says: “We don’t have an office out there, we don’t need to have an office out there.
“Indeed, I think it would be counter-productive for us to have offices out there, apart from the up-front expense, because you would just undermine the very relationships you have with local firms who would want to engage you for your particular skills set.”
While Oliver still fee-earns and works hard on growing Peters & Peters’s international network, since 2012 he has become more involved in bringing up the younger lawyers at the firm.
He says: “The clients who come in here now, they will expect me to be fully involved and to be part of the decision making process.
“But actually what they want are, particularly from a value point of view, bright lawyers who are hardworking, enthusiastic, smart, responsible, responsive, who enjoy being part of a team and the last four years have given me the opportunity to develop that internally within the practice.”
One area of importance is supporting lawyers in building contacts.
O’Kane came up with the idea of giving Peters & Peters lawyers a budget of £500 each with which to entertain clients.
And they can do whatever they want with it.
“If they want to go out to a £450 lunch with some of their contacts of theirs, that’s fine. All we say is just tell us who you’ve gone out with, do a little mini-report, follow up.
“Or if they want to go out for 10 very expensive cocktail evenings with some friends of theirs in leading law firms…”
Ten?!
“Okay, maybe five…but you can invest in them for the purpose of giving them their responsibility and making their own contacts in the same way as I did when I was 29 and on the international stage.”
So where is the next big wave in white collar crime?
For that, Oliver turns to snowy-haired septuagenarian and Peters & Peters’ white collar legend Monty Raphael.
“Without being a soothsayer or stargazer, the latest sexy thing on the block is cybercrime and nobody has quite figured out what it means,” says Oliver.
“The interesting thing is that it arises at every level of what we do.”
Oliver explains: “Monty Raphael, in fairness to him, saw this coming.
“He’s 79 years young and I wouldn’t regard him as a Renaissance man in terms of operating computers but at the same time he’s always been a great person to read the market, he is someone who has seen that in fact cyber crime is going to be the big new area.
“You think about for example reputational management, I mean reputational management and the impact that can have economically…it has tremendous implications.”
Oliver isn’t going anywhere soon. He turns 60 in September and if his mentor Raphael is anything to go by, Oliver could be there for many more years to come.
The Lawyer Hot 100 – Keith Oliver, Peters & Peters
The recession has sparked a renaissance for litigation boutiques and, as senior partner of Peters & Peters, Keith Oliver is leading from the front. Oliver steered the firm from the West End into the City, staying focused on being the best in the business for white-collar crime and civil fraud work. The litigator also fought a long and tense battle with RBS in 2010, representing US businessmen George Gillett and Tom Hicks in their fight for ownership of Liverpool FC.
Oliver’s in-demand skills also earned him an instruction representing Formula 1 (F1) tycoon Bernie Ecclestone in UK litigation over the sale of F1 in 2005 from BayernLB to CVC Capital Partners, a deal that has become the subject of intense scrutiny.
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