Tulkinghorn: The swot team

Rhythm is a dancer
Stepping into the limelight and slipping on his dancing shoes this week is Peter Ferbrache, recently appointed senior partner of offshore firm Ozannes.

Ferbrache and his dance partner Kelly Baudains jived their way into winning Guernsey’s very own version of Strictly Come Dancing – ‘Dancefloor Challenge’ – beating 10 other local ‘celebrity’ couples.

“There were 400 people watching. We were the last couple and it was midnight,” Ferbrache told Tulkinghorn. “I’ve had my moments in court, but this was something different.”

There are plenty of lawyers out there following in the footsteps of last week’s John Stewart, the dancing general counsel of the Wellcome Trust. But are there any street dancing, body-popping lawyers out there?

The swot team

CMS Cameron McKenna associates sent to brush up on their skills at Goethe University in Frankfurt received more than they bargained for, Tulkinghorn hears.

There was the usual tedious droning about ‘business awareness’ and ‘sector focus’, but we ­suspect that the 150 or so lawyers came away with only one lesson imprinted on their memories.

A former FBI negotiator was brought in to give a tutorial on dealing with tense situations.

The associates struggled to find commonground. Did he mean situations like working on due diligence until 2am, or paginating bundles of litigation papers? Not exactly.

The FBI man had an example from his own career. He de-scribed receiving a phone call from a man who said: “You’ve got 60 seconds to get me a car or I’ll shoot my wife.”

Tulkinghorn sympathises, having often wanted to shoot his wife and drive away into the sunset, but wonders what the class learned from the case.

In an unrelated development last week, a Camerons associate was involved in a tense stand-off after threatening to shoot his supervising partner unless meeting room biscuits were upgraded to chocolate HobNobs.

A cock and bull story

Tulkinghorn was shocked to read on the interweb last Wednesday (1 April) that Macfarlanes had been forced to pull an art installation at its new offices after discovering that the artists were planning to pose nude as human statues.

According to the report on TheLawyer.com, Macfarlanes held a competition for students at Goldsmiths College to design a ‘piece’ for the new reception.

The winning entry was due to be displayed in the building last week, but the firm has pulled out at the last minute after telling students the piece was not appropriate.

A source at the firm said the installation featured a male and female artist ­posing as Adam and Eve, with celebrity images painted on their bodies.

But now Tulkinghorn has discovered that those fiends on TheLawyer.com had made it all up for a joke. Luckily, senior partner Charles Martin only had to email a couple of colleagues to reassure them it was not true and remind them of the date.

Left red faced

Tulkinghorn is all for raising money for charity. Red Nose Day and other such money-raising events are worthy causes that the legal ­profession should be keen to get involved in.
But there is a limit. Sporting a red nose or partaking in a sponsored silence is more than enough.

Some people take it too far. Warwickshire lawyer Richard Cox of Needham & James, step forward.

One wonders whether clients responded well to the rouged cheeks and eye make-up…