What was your route into the profession?
Pretty circuitous! I grew up in a working-class family in suburban Philadelphia and there were no professionals in my family. I didn't work in any form of office environment until I was 21 years old when I was a messenger boy at Sullivan & Cromwell. When I was an undergraduate, I took a class on public international law and found it fascinating and something I took to naturally. I then went to a law school that focused on international law matters and where my university mentor's son was a professor—now Congressman Jamie Raskin.
I worked on international law matters in law school, namely pursuing jus cogens violations against Henry Kissinger for his role in fomenting the coup in Chile. After two years at a federal appeals court in Atlanta, I went to work at a law firm where I utilised my previous experience by bringing Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act claims against Iran and Libya for sponsoring terrorist actions in the 1980s.
That work had a limited shelf life, and I was pulled away from it by some arbitration practitioners. While the nature of that work was much more commercial, I was hooked and realised that practising it at a high level required ‘a geographical’, so I relocated to London where I've lived for 14 years. My love for London has dissipated over the years, but my clients often need me in far flung places quickly and unfortunately, while Philadelphia has the best sports teams, it doesn't have the best airline connections...
What has been your biggest career challenge so far?
That is a fascinating question that prompted some deep reflection! In 2011 we obtained the first presidential commutation from Barack Obama for a lady named Eugenia Jennings who had been imprisoned for a remarkably lengthy time for selling a small amount of crack cocaine to support her young children. Everything about Eugenia's case made her the ideal candidate for presidential commutation—to the extent you can say that exists—but in the early days the Obama administration really did not want to be seen as weak on crime, so we faced an uphill challenge, but a hill we eventually climbed. While I worked on that matter, I felt a certain confidence that we could get there, so I'm not sure it was the biggest challenge of my career.
So, in truth, the biggest challenge was just getting my foot in the door. I really did not know how to go about becoming a lawyer. No one in my family had even graduated from college, so everything was very confusing. I didn't do campus recruiting and I didn't apply to jobs until after I graduated, despite having very strong grades. I just didn't know where to begin. At the risk of sounding silly, once I got my bearings, everything has been much easier—but during those years in law school and the first few years afterwards, I was really fumbling for a direction. I knew what I wanted to work on, but I struggled with how to get to a place where I could do that work. I was also daunted by the pedigree of some of my colleagues, which really played on some of the deep insecurities and inadequacies I held from childhood. I just assumed that my fellow associates in a law firm who, let's face it, are your competitors for advancement, were much better, well-rounded lawyers than me because they had gone to Harvard and the like. In some cases, that was true. But true or not, it didn't matter—the partners I worked for just wanted me to perform.
Which person within the legal profession inspires you most?
There aren't many—I find my inspiration mainly in folks like my two uncles Dominic and Louis, the sons of Italian immigrants who were, respectively, one of the first on Omaha beach and protected Arctic convoys during the Second World War and then came back to suburban Philadelphia and opened small businesses, raised families and still found the time to lead the Ardmore fire department. I can only aspire to have that level of civic commitment.
But I will say: my boss David Boies is in his mid-80s, has been America's most successful trial lawyer, and yet every December at our firm retreat, I see the way his children adore him. If you can have that kind of career and your kids still like you, you did something right.
If you weren't a lawyer, what would you choose as an alternate career?
My answer to this question was always that I wanted to be one of those hard-charging, hard-drinking war zone journalists, like the guys Sydney Schanberg hung out with in the hotel bar in The Killing Fields. I like writing and I like high-tension situations. But now that I have children and I don’t drink, it’s not nearly as appealing!
I’d probably try to become a popular, accessible historian like a David McCullough, Heather Cox Richardson or Robert Caro. I love their work and love being knee-deep in primary sources in beautiful libraries. I am much more cut out for those environs than the job sites of my brother’s plumbing company. I learned that the hard way!
Who is your favourite fictional lawyer?
Charlie Kelly from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, specialist in bird law.
What change would you make to the profession?
There can be no doubt that artificial intelligence will reduce the need for the number of lawyers in the world—something that will consequently reduce the number of great lawyer jokes— but much of that reduction will happen at the junior end of the profession, which will create further barriers to entry, particularly for lawyers like me who didn’t go to the best law schools and had the above-described circuitous path to the law. So, if I could change our seemingly endless fascination with our own obsolescence I would. Personally, I find the law enthralling because it’s a very human business, so all of the talk about non-human lawyering is about as boring as being sat next to someone training for a marathon at a dinner party.
How do you relax?
Ideally, my sons and I wear ourselves out at a skateboard park, we eat some terrific Turkish food, and then I fall asleep reading a Jennifer Egan novel.
Timothy Foden is partner and co-head of the arbitration practice at Boies Schiller Flexner, based at their London office.
