Want to know the secrets behind managing wealth on a global scale?

This week, I’m joined by James Quarmby, Partner and Head at Private Wealth at Stephenson Harwood in London. Described as a legend of the private wealth space, James shares his inspiring journey to building a team across six jurisdictions, tackles misconceptions about tax and explains what it takes to succeed in private wealth law.

Whether you’re a legal professional or simply curious about the world of wealth management, this episode is packed with great insights. Tune in now to learn from the best!

So why should you be listening in? 

You can hear Rob and James discussing:

– The Unconventional But Refreshing Career Path and Backround Taken by James

– Complexities and Challenges of Private Wealth Practice

– James’ Strategic Approach to Building the Private Wealth Practice at Stephenson Harwood

– His Efforts to Correct Common Misconceptions About Tax and Wealthy Individuals

– Important and Valuable Advice for Aspiring Lawyers

Connect with James here – https://uk.linkedin.com/in/james-quarmby-24327411

Transcript

James Quarmby  0:00  

Tax is going to be the battleground. If the cost of borrowing for the government goes up, we’re going to have more tax rises. And so this is going to be the thing that’s going to dominate and dominate and dominate. So I think it’s massively important as a private client lawyer, it annoys me when people just get it so fantastically wrong about the client base that I look after, and I’d like to put that right. I shouldn’t be scared of standing up for my client base.

Robert Hanna  0:25  

On today’s legally speaking Podcast. I’m delighted to be joined by James cormy. James is a partner and head of private wealth at Stephenson Harwood in London. He created the private wealth team in 2014 and since then, has grown the team to over 50 lawyers across six jurisdictions, having been described as a fount of all knowledge and legend of the private wealth space by chambers. James has extensive experience advising on UK and international taxation, pensions, trust asset protection and HMRC disputes. He has also featured on BBC Breakfast, BBC News, Sky News, Bloomberg TV, LBC and times radio. So a very big, warm welcome, James!

James Quarmby  1:05  

James, Thanks, Rob, good to see you. Yeah. It’s a

Robert Hanna  1:08  

pleasure to have you on the show. And before we dive into all the great work you’ve been getting up to, we do have a customary icebreaker question here on the legally speaking podcast, which is on a scale of one to 1010, being very real, what would you rate the hit series suit in terms of its reality of the law? If you’ve seen it? Well,

James Quarmby  1:26  

I’ve, I have to admit I have not seen an entire episode of suits. I probably watched one bit of one episode, and metaphorically through a brick at the television. So if I could give it a one, you can give

Robert Hanna  1:43  

it a one, and I think you’ve justified your answer very clearly. And with that, we’ll move swiftly on to talk about, yeah, we’ll talk all about you. So would you mind telling our listeners a bit about your background and career journey?

James Quarmby  1:55  

So my career journey is perhaps slightly irregular. You know, most people that I see coming in to the firm have had the traditional trajectory of school, university, internships and traineeships. I didn’t do any of that. Well, I did, actually, I did go to school. Let me just get that out of the way. And I did go to actually, I did, yeah, I did go to university in the end, but what happened was that, so my background is I come from a very working class part of Essex and in a single mother situation, so I needed to earn some money to help pay the household bills. So at 16, I left school and I went to work for the commercial cashiers department of British Telecom North London district. There you go. Very glamorous and bless I mean, people do complain about BT and all these huge utilities, but bless their hearts, they saw something in me, because I started off opening envelopes, if you can just imagine, these are the days where you paid your bills by sending a check and account of foil in an envelope to the appropriate so we would get, literally, like, 12 sacks of mail every morning and that needed to be opened and reconciled. But BT saw something in me, and I got promoted. I went and then worked in the accounts department dealing with customers or subscribers. We used to call them. Used to call them subs, which always made me feel like they were slightly sub human. Oh, I’ve got a sub on the line and and then the BT saw something in me and put me on fast track to management. So I then was put on I was basically sent to business school. That’s really what happened on a sort of day release basis for for a period of four years. So in business school, I learned business finance, economics, and there’s law in there as well, which is quite interesting. Come back to that later. So for those people that follow me on LinkedIn, you’ll see that I have, I I’m a bit of a tax policy geek, and the reason for that is that I’ve got economics and finance qualifications, so I do actually understand the underlying economics of tax And so fast forward, after going through all that, you know, I then left BT when I was 21 and I then went to university to do a law degree. And then when it came time to qualify, because I’m going to skip over my traineeship, because the firm was with that absolutely hated, and I will not even mention their names, then I, when I decided to qualify a tax job, seemed absolutely perfect, because if you’ve got an economics background, and also I worked in a an Accounts team, and because I eventually became a quite senior manager in BT, in the commercial cashiers team, where we had to reconcile, like 8 million pounds of income every day, moving into tax laws seemed quite a neat fit. And so it was a bit of an experiment on my part. Up, you know, am I any good at tax law? Well, you won’t know till you’ve tried.

Robert Hanna  5:04  

Now, am I any good at tax law? Now, I don’t know, but I seem to be making a decent living. So someone seems to think I’m so so that in as quickly as I can give you, is how I got to going into tax Yeah, absolutely. And you know what? Thank you for being so open about your journey as well, because it’s only going to help so many people from all walks of life. Walks of life who are thinking about careers, and you know what that what they’re getting up to and showing everything is possible. So maybe let’s, let’s fast forward then, because you’ve had a host of accolades throughout your legal career, and as I said in the intro, you know, described as a legend of the private wealth space. So I guess for you know, we’ve got listeners from from all sort of walks those aspiring to get into the law, some sort of already currently practising the law and and elsewhere. So could we start just very simply by explaining what private wealth is? Please for our listeners, yeah,

James Quarmby  5:50  

it’s a bit of a trendy name for private client. And I think I’m not sure at what point this happens, but at some point in the I’d say probably more the turn of the century, private client was seen as little bit of a stuffy description for what we do, because a lot of the outside world and the profession itself saw private client as boring little lawyers scratching away with wills and trusts and probate. And the private client world has become much more internationalised, so private wealth, which then encompasses taxation, because typically, private client lawyers were not very good at tax. You know, your high street private client lawyer didn’t need to be, because the only tax they ever really encountered was inheritance tax. And as far as CGT was concerned, the only CGT was, well, actually there’s a tax free uplift on death, so we don’t need to worry about it. So private wealth is an attempt to encapsulate that traditional side of drafting and process with tax advice and then wider wealth advisory, which is essentially what the big firms do now, is that, no, we’re not bankers and we’re not asset managers, but we do advise on wealth. So private wealth is essentially that shorthand. When people talk to me in parties, I just say, look, I look after rich people. Yeah, that’s the easiest way of describing it, but the skill set is completely different, and this is why, you know, we often have great problems recruiting people, because just because someone’s good at doing wills and trusts and probates and enduring powers of attorney does not mean they’re any good for our practice, because you need a completely different set of skills. On top of that. You need all of those skills, plus you need to understand a lot more about finance, a lot more about holding structures, be they, trust, partnerships, companies, the interaction between the two. You need a lot of tax knowledge. So it’s actually quite hard finding people. It’s not boring. But I would say that if you’re not very good at it, or you’re learning it can be quite stressful,

Robert Hanna  8:02  

yeah. And just obviously, from from any my only recruiting business, and knowing how certain other firms are structured, and, you know, getting that level of experience across the board to what would obviously be required to join a great firm like Stephenson Harwood, I fully appreciate what you’re saying. Let’s get more into your your day to day then, because obviously, you know, you’ve risen quickly a typical day as a partner for you and head of a private wealth practice, what sort of stuff do you get up to? What are some of your

James Quarmby  8:27  

responsibilities? Well, I’m very conscious when I wake up. I’ve probably only got about 14 hours of time to eat, travel, do work, and all the rest of it. So I think, I think time management is is absolutely crucial, and my job is a constant battle to find time to do things that are important and pushing away things that are not important, or I don’t want to do one of the lovely things about getting older and more important and being named as a legend of the private client space. And all that is you can say no, and it’s one of the best words in the English language. So if there’s stuff I don’t want to do, I’ll just say no, thanks. I really don’t fancy that. Whereas when you were younger and you know you you don’t want to say no, because you think someone’s gonna get annoyed with me, or they’re not going to ask me again, and all the rest of it. So, so, so really, it’s just managing that. We’ve got a team in London of 12 or 13 associates doing the private, core private wealth stuff that I’ve described, and I’ve got pretty much work with all of them, so I’m not necessarily managing their lives, because we’ve actually got other partners in the team that do the sort of, if you like, the pastoral management. I’m not terribly interested in that. It’s not my skill set. So I would be managing the cases, supervising them, but my main role is. I’d say, is outreach, and that’s why I decided to be more active on LinkedIn. Most lawyers don’t go anywhere near their LinkedIn. They only do anything where there’s some kind of anniversary or they won an award, so there’ll be a bit of humble bragging on LinkedIn, and then they won’t go near it. But when you get more engaged with LinkedIn, it can’t really stop. And the more you put on, the more engagement you get. And some people thought was a sort of vanity project on my part to sort of just get my name out more. And it wasn’t actually because I just enjoy broadcasting information in a certain way, and I wasn’t expecting to get work out of it. But as it happens, as the way that LinkedIn algorithms work is that the more you post, the more engagement you get, the more engagement you get. It’s kind of self fulfilling prophecy. I actually get quite a lot of work out of it now. So I can do a post and it reaches 2030, 40,000 people. The last post I put on has already got up to 130,000 it would take me an awfully long time to have 130,000 meetings. So just in turn, going back to my original point, I don’t have any time. So if I can push out some information or review and it engages 40, 50,000 people, some of those people, I mean, most those people, not going to be useful to me, some of those people will be quite useful people, and they will turn into clients, and that is what has actually happened. So now I don’t spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, despite my profile. It’s probably about 10 or 15 minutes a day, but it’s very well spent. The other side is the traditional face to face meetings to pitch to clients. And the reason the clients are coming to me is because they’ve been recommended by the usual range of existing clients intermediaries, or they’ve just heard of me, or read about me in a directory, or, you know, they’ve seen me on media of various kinds. So So I’d say probably half my time is developing business and bringing business in, and the other half is doing the business and then pushing away stuff I don’t like.

Robert Hanna  12:11  

I love that. And thank you for just being so candid. Remember a mentor said to me very early on to my career, Rob, say yes until you can afford to say no. And you gave a great example

James Quarmby  12:20  

I love it. I’m gonna adopt that. Yeah,

Robert Hanna  12:23  

and it’s so true. And, you know, I’ve been banging on about LinkedIn. I always think I was one of the early sort of legal community recruiter people putting myself out there. And you know, you why wouldn’t you go to a free site that has every prospective client you would probably ever hope for in the world of the white collar work? And you know, you’re getting the game. And it’s not about just hey, up on this award. It’s like, can you teach this audience? Can you educate this audience? Can you, you know, inform them and build a community, and then so much business that comes from that. And you know, it’s great that you’ve cottoned on to this, because it’s so much low hanging fruit that actually, if people dared to put themselves out there a bit, can be super successful. And you’ve worked on a plethora of cases. Jamie, when we were doing our research, we’re like, wow, where do we even start? This an impressive resume, but is there one memorable case that you’ve worked on that you wouldn’t mind sharing with our listeners? And why?

James Quarmby  13:11  

So the problem I have, of course, is that, unlike corporate lawyers, we can’t brag about the cases that we’ve worked on because it’s all extremely private. So I couldn’t mention a single case in naming a person, but I can give you a flavour of some of the extraordinary cases that I’ve worked on. I mean, yeah, because I’m a I’m a private client, though I know we call it private wealth, and we’re going to continue to do so, but we are dealing with humans, and humans come in all shapes and sizes and all attitudes. When you’re dealing with wealthy families, you’ve you’ve started this programme talking about suits. On the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got succession, which is probably one of the finest pieces of the TV I’ve ever seen. And as one that’s, you know, I work for some of the biggest family offices in the world, and where we’ve got, literally, people like that. And so succession is probably, if you ask people that work in private wealth, like, How accurate is succession when you’re dealing with rich people? I’m gonna give that a like a nine out of 10. They’re not as funny as the as the guys session. That’s that’s the slight difference, right? They often take themselves a little bit too seriously, but in terms of that dynamic of working within families, and you can imagine when people have got money and and a lot of attitude, and they fall out with a family member. It’s like world war three. So I’ve been involved in a number of high level disputes, including a brother and a sister that fell out. Everything was fine until the everything’s fine until the found. Dies because, what? Yeah, Generation One, he or she, they’re able to squash any descent and like this is, it’s my way or the highway. And then when that leading person dies, then everyone scrabbles around for primacy and for assets and everything else and it. And I’ve been involved in so many of those where I’ve had a brother and sister fighting over the family company, and they’ve been at it for, I don’t know, five or six years and burned through. I must be close to 10 million in fees on that. Yeah. And I had a ludicrous example of a family falling out again after a founder where the there were five children and they broke into to effectively two camps. And that was ridiculous. I was having to hold meetings with the family where one set of family member did not even agree to be in the same room. So we had that family members, son, or cousin or something I can’t remember, in the room, on FaceTime, so that they could convey, I mean, the whole thing was just ludicrous. So I think, and I have been involved in really high profile stuff, which I can’t tell you about, but in terms of what’s memorable when I look back on my career, it’s those crazy moments where you just think, why am I why am I in this room acting as a parent for these grown ups that are way wealthier than me, and if they just had any sense, they’d just sit down and work it out. And that’s the interesting thing about private client work is you never know what’s going to happen next, and there’s a lot of emotion involved, in a way that a corporate lawyer won’t experience, because corporate lawyers are dealing with general counsels and directors and professional people. When you’re dealing with the Logan Roys of the world and their offspring, it’s a different story.

Robert Hanna  17:01  

Yeah, and I, again, I remember mental saying to me, Look, Rob, when emotions go up, intelligence, most of the time goes down. I think you gave a great example there of just, you know, having some, some sensibility. And again, my late grandfather ran his own law firm. Used to say, first generation makes it, second generation breaks it, and typically a third generation breaks it. And I think you’ve probably seen some, some examples of that as well. But, I mean, look, you’ve built a phenomenal private wealth. We’ll stick with private wealth, just because there’s trends to that team. How have you gone about doing that at Stephenson Harwood? And you know, what’s been, the roadmap you’ve used? And you know, how have you gone about expanding into multiple jurisdictions, including the likes

James Quarmby  17:38  

of Dubai? Well, it’s not all down to me, but just on the journey. So I, I started, I qualified and worked for rooks rider, which is a great little firm, offshore tax firm, and I worked there for, I don’t know, three or four years. And then I wanted to move out of London, and actually, I’m in the countryside now. This is some in East Sussex, which is the centre of the universe, as you know. So and I work for a firm called DMH Stallard, and which is a very old fashioned, quite diverse, though, firm in Sussex offices everywhere, and I came in to start an international tax team for them. And then they eventually made me head of the whole, you know, tax trust probate thing. And then I decided I’d arrogantly decide I’d sort of grown out of them. So I then moved to Thomas Edgar, which was the biggest private client firm in the whole of the Sussex area, and formed an international tax team there, because they didn’t have it. They had lots of private client lawyers, but and I had a tax team, which grew to about 10 or 12 people. And then I realised that I was spending a lot of time in London, so why am I saying the Sussex firm and getting and earning Sussex profits when I’m spending at least half my time in London? And then I thought, You know what, let’s just go move to a London firm. And the reason I chose Stephenson Hall is they had no private client team. Yeah. So this may seem mad, because I had offers from other firms that you would have heard of that have got existing private client teams come and become a partner. The most attractive offer was from Stevens Hall, because they said we used to have a private client team, and we got rid of it because it was too domestic and not very exciting and but we’re an international law firm, and we want an international private wealth team, but we don’t have anyone to do it, and they didn’t even have any associates to give me. So I just it was just me and a secretary, and I must have been insane to do it. And in fact, I had people saying to me, you must be insane. Why would you go. Who to a commercial law firm with no private client presence whatsoever, and try and build a team, you’re building yourself up for failure, and it was hard, and the only way you do it is just by not giving up. And I’ve often described myself as the Terminator, not not because I wear dark glasses indoors all the time and ride a motorbike. It’s just that I just keep going, and I won’t stop until I succeed. I’m very tenacious, and I was convinced that I would be able to create something fantastic. Because, as you know, seems I was a fantastic firm, and they’re in all the right jurisdictions. That’s the thing, right? They’re in Dubai, which is big wealth Centre in Singapore and Hong Kong and China. Where’s all the money coming from these days? It’s coming from Asia and the Middle East. You know, we’re not minting with many millionaires now in in the UK, as we used to. So the foundation was there, we just didn’t have the people. So it’s been a constant battle to get recognition. And this explains why, you know, is all over the place, on the press, in 2017 on the TV and all that, that one way of just drawing attention to yourself is just to wave your arms as much as possible in the most public places. And so it was a very deliberate and cynical strategy on my part that if I just make myself very present on national media, including TV, and the famous interview I had with is really the interview I had with John Humphries, basically sent me into sort of PR stratosphere because He decided to take on a lawyer who’s actually quite pugnacious, and I decided to fight back in an interview, and that catapulted me and then I was on telly, and I was on all sorts of stuff, so that drew a lot of attention to the firm. And then we managed to attract some really fantastic people into the firm. And I think the real turning point was that as I was able to take some of the people that used to work with me at Thomas Edgar into the firm side to make it bigger, and then we’ve managed to attract, really two fantastic lawyers from Morris Turner, Gardner, partners on the contentious trust side. That’s Helena Berman and Jenny McEwen. So big shout out for them. They were persuaded to join because we actually had a private client team, albeit run the small and run by me. And Jenny has been very helpful in helping me build this out to where we are now, which is, you know, where we are, nine partners, and I don’t know, 30 people in London. We’ve got a partner and four people in Dubai. We’ve got a couple of partners in Hong Kong. I mean, it’s, it’s gone really well. And everyone loves Funny enough, even in law, everyone loves a newcomer with something to say. Because, you know, the old school firms have been doing private client for a while, 100 years, in some cases, 200 years. Well, we all know they exist, and then suddenly, what’s this? Stephenson Howard, coming along, doing private client work. Let’s have a look at them. So you’ve always got a little bit more attention because you’re new and doing something that we’re not people aren’t used to you doing. So that that was my philosophy to building we should just keep on going. Don’t don’t take no for an answer. Don’t ever give up, and then eventually you’ll get there, and thank God I have because otherwise it looked like a big fall. Today’s

Robert Hanna  23:33  

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James Quarmby  24:56  

sitting at your desk. No, and that’s why I tell you. My associates that want to go up like you, as tiresome as it is, you need to go to the cocktail parties. You need to go to the networking events, and you need to meet people, because you can’t meet people from sitting at your desk. Now, we were forced to do that during lockdown, which is a horrible time. I’d spend the entire day looking at myself on a screen. But now we’re back in a normal world. You go out and you network, and you meet people, and you exchange cards, and then you follow it up, and then if you find an affinity with someone, you will get work. But if you don’t do any of that and you just think you can get work from just being good lawyer and and drafting wills nicely, you’re going to be sadly mistaken. You’ll reach a ceiling of how much you can earn. If you want to be really successful and you want to run something exciting, then you have to actually make some sacrifices, and that does mean doing things you don’t necessarily want to do, because, after all, unless you’re a real extrovert, you won’t enjoy working a room at a conference. Yeah. I mean, I don’t enjoy it, and I don’t think anyone does. I do it because it must be done. And when I meet nice people, I do enjoy that aspect of it, but when you first walk in, there’s a whole bunch of people holding either a cup of tea or coffee or glass of champagne to then have to go up and talk to people and make nice. It is an effort.

Robert Hanna  26:19  

The message in there is, you know, success, it’s hard now, we need to be live to that, that, you know, the hours, things you’ve invested in to get to where you are. And you know that hope and that should inspire people to want to put in the work to get to, you know, the great heights. I want to talk about tax. Obviously, you know an area you’re exceptionally knowledgeable in, because there’s so much miss, bad information out there are misconceptions around tax. You know, what are some of the common ones you see around some of the common misconceptions around tax, and why are they so untrue? Just things you hear, perhaps at those cocktail parties or, you know, friends of friends, or even in the law or other lawyers. That’s

James Quarmby  26:53  

a really good question, because I wrote an article for taxation magazine, which is the top 10 worst stereotypes about tax, because it drives completely nuts. There’s so much misinformation about it, and this is one of the reasons I do what I do in LinkedIn, because I like to puncture these myths. A classic myth is that your your billionaire, will pay a lower effective rate of tax than his cleaner. So I explored that one and gave a scenario for taxation magazine, just to show how completely rubbish that statement is. I particularly hate cliches. So loophole every time I hear that, I’m going to give someone a yellow card, and if they use the word loophole twice, they’ll get a red card and sent off anyone paying their fair share of tax. When talking about high earning people will get the full hair dryer treatment because I’m a tax geek and proud of it. I’m the kind of person that will look at the HMRC stats and the stats from the ONS and all the rest of it, and this is why I’m confident of doing quite spicy media interviews in that I’ve actually got all the facts. So when people say to me, because I’ve done all this, like I’ve had debates on radio four World Service against left wing economic people, people, works, rocks, fam and things like that, saying, well, rich people don’t pay their fair share and blah, blah. So Okay, if that’s true, well, how come the top 1% of taxpayers are responsible for 30% of all income tax. How come 5% of all taxpayers are responsible for all of the capital gains tax? You know, I’ve got all the figures on that. So there’s a popular misconception that wealthy people don’t pay their way or pay their fair share. And when it comes to non DOMs, which is my own specialty, there’s a bit of xenophobia added into the anti wealth prejudice, which is genuinely, speaking, people in this country think Rich people are blood suckers, and they don’t pay their fair share, and they’ve got such clever lawyers that they hardly pay any tax. Well, news flash, we’re clever, but we’re not that clever, you know, we can’t make the tax go away. They will have to pay tax now. We can make sure they don’t pay too much, but ultimately, what they do pay is a hell of a lot. I’ve got clients paying more tax than sometimes whole towns pay, you know. And when you look at the stats, there’s that guy. I’ve forgotten his name, actually, but he was actually a non DOM, and he paid 600 million pounds of tax last year. I mean, that’s that’s scary. So what I will try and do is correct some of the myths about my own client base. And I get a lot of flack for that, because people will say, Well, you’re just a right wing lackey, which, by the way, I’m not, or you would say that, wouldn’t you, because you’re a private wealth lawyer. In other words, I’m so self interested, I’m not capable of having a, you know, an accurate and honest opinion about something and all the rest of it. So I take all of that flak, because actually, for people that do. Have an open mind and are willing to listen that kind of factual information when I you know. So the and I did, I wrote something for, yes, also did something for the daily, Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, which was kind of a precis of the taxation magazine, one which is like, let’s look at some myths about wealthy people, and that’s got a huge readership, and there’ll be a lot of people that read the telegraph who will still have those prejudices about wealthy people, and they read that they might change their minds. So so I think, and I’m not expecting any medals, I’m certainly not expecting a no being for this services to wealthy people, but part a lot, not just part, a lot of what I do in LinkedIn is it annoys me when people just get it so fantastically wrong about the client base that I look after. And I like to put that right, because I don’t like mistruths, half truths and all the rest of it. It annoys me. So I do tend to engage more on that side, because I think as a private client lawyer, I shouldn’t be scared of standing up for my client base, and I think some clients would appreciate that other private client lawyers you will talk to will tell you, we go nowhere near the press because our clients expect us to be discreet and invisible. Totally the opposite of my approach, which is, I like it if my client sees me in The Daily Telegraph I was on the front page of the business section of these Sunday times a month ago, and I actually get phone calls and emails from clients saying, that’s fantastic. Well done for doing that or sending me a copy of the article, because, actually, I don’t subscribe to the times, so sometimes I don’t even know I’m in it, and my client sent a photocopy of the article to me by email. So So I think one thing you can do when you get more senior in the law is you can actually move beyond just being a practitioner, and you can actually be and I hate to use the word influencer, because it has a different thing. I don’t mean it in that, you know, we’ve, I’ve actually got a platform where I can influence people, I think, in the right way. So that’s why I use it. And I quite enjoy doing that. And it’s important

Robert Hanna  32:16  

that you do that, because you are correcting misinformation. And, you know, I’ve collaborated with, with Gary V that people who are interested in social media has a huge brand, and, you know, he talks a lot about, we need to stop calling it social media. We’re moving away from that. It’s actually interest media. You know, we’re in this form of interest media. People are interested. They want to know more about your knowledge, you know, the wisdom that you’re sharing, particularly on A, B to B and B to C platform like LinkedIn, but principally B to B. I think it’s, brilliant what you’re doing. I mean, we could talk for hours about about tax but I guess I’ve got a quick, well, it’s probably not a quick question, but as a registered sort of tax technician, how do you see tax policies in the UK in the coming years, and are there any sort of trends that we should be paying attention to?

James Quarmby  32:58  

The thing that’s keeping me exceptionally busy is the non DOM reforms, which kick in from April 25 so what the professional community expecting is about 1/3 of the high, highest earners of non DOMs to depart from the UK in the next two years. So that’s that’s a tragedy for the UK, and that that that is something that is going to be bad for the UK, because also we don’t, we don’t have anything to replace them with, because we don’t have an investment visa regime. That’s why it’s even more stupid for labour to do what they did, although, to be fair, the Tories started it in March, at least if you’re replacing the non DOMs that have left. It’s not so bad, but there’s no investment visa regime, so we’re going to lose potentially 12 billion a year from those people, and that’s a shame, I think, in terms of more mainstream tax out of the you know, because they’re only 80,000 non DOMs. What about the rest of the other 70 billion people in the UK? I think the big issue is really going to be for this government on getting to grips with the finances, because that’s going to massively affect tax policy. Labour has made some very fundamental mistakes in their beginning of their administration. They’ve not realised at all. They’re used to not being listened to in opposition, and you can’t blame they’ve been opposition for so long. But as soon as you are elected or electable, what you say matters. So is when you’re elected and you you say the budget’s going to your prime minister says the budget’s going to be really painful people listen. And what we saw is economic numbers now anticipating a really painful budget before it actually happened. This is what I’ve been saying on LinkedIn. These numbers, which show zero growth is because of the budget. And normally the numbers take longer to go through, but people were already cutting back on investment prior to the budget. So what’s happened now is that because when. Getting the growth we’ve expected, and because bond yields have gone up, the borrowing cost of the government have gone up, which means she’s going to have to raid taxes again, because labour aren’t ambitious enough to try and tackle one of the other economic levers, which is productivity within our economy. So I think there’s going to be a big so in terms of tax, there’s going to be a lot of it. We’ve got the highest level of tax since the Second World War, and this is not Labor’s fault all, because toys got us to the highest point, and Labor’s gone and piled on some more pain, but they need to start rowing back. So we need to focus on productivity, so that tax rates can come down, so that productivity and GDP can go up, and we’ll get to an equilibrium. So tax is going to be the battleground, two things in particular, and there’s no going back on the NIC increase, because Labor’s decided that we need it, and it will bring in 24 billion, but that is going to cut back, and will cut back business investment and employment. The farming community are apoplectic over the IHT stuff, and this is gonna right. If I was advising labour, I’d be saying, What are you doing? At best, what you’re doing the it is gonna bring about 800 million and yet, you have punished every single constituency in the UK that’s got farming and you’ve won over 100 constituencies in farming communities that you’ve just lost. So the last election, right? All these farming communities voted for you because you made promises about business, property relief and agricultural relief before the election, which you’ve forgotten about. You’ve lost those seats. I can promise you those people do not forget so I live in a by the way, I live in a farming community all around here, farmers and fields and everything. So tax is going to be a massive battleground. Labour can’t touch income tax rates, ni for employees and VAT. So it’s all going to be on the highly contentious employer burden and on our farmers and small business let’s not forget that the other changes made affect all of the small businesses in the UK as well, and that is going to be a massive battleground. And if the if the government doesn’t give way on these points, and it’s utterly stupid not to give way, because it’s a rounding error, the extra IHT, they’re bringing in is just a rounding error, right? If you put one percentage point on National Insurance contributions. You know, as we’ve seen it, employers say bring in 10 billion. The whole of i the whole of IHT, all of it, brings in about eight and a half. So, yeah, the bit that they’ve changed, which is incensed all these business owners, is bringing in a small percentage of that, and it’s just very silly. So, so I think what you’re going to find is she’s going to have to dip into taxes more, because as the cost of borrowing goes up, she has to then she had headroom. She mentioned headroom in the in the budget, well, I’ve got 30 billion of headroom because of, you know, because of where borrowing was. If the cost of borrowing for the government goes up, that headroom is completely evaporated. We’re going to have more tax rises. And so this is going to be the thing that’s going to dominate and dominate and dominate for almost the entirety of Labor’s first administration, possibly the last one. And so I think it’s massively important.

Robert Hanna  38:35  

Yeah, I think it’s fascinating insights. And really appreciate you going into that kind of level of detail for us, James, and that’s why it’s been a pleasure having you on learning a bit more about your your story. I guess I want to ask just a sort of final question, if I may. We’ve talked a lot about LinkedIn. Obviously you’ve been in legal cheeks, articles, super law, super influencers. I know you’re not too keen on that, on that term, but you do say, you know, too much content from lawyers is beautifully researched but measured undoubtedly rather dull. So you know, you say, Let your inner demon out that we may like it. So whatever advice would you have for those lawyers that might be sitting in the wings that are reading your content, that perhaps not brave enough to put their to put their toe in or perhaps looking to try and get a bit more engagement. What would you say to that? Well, you

James Quarmby  39:26  

clearly read one of my LinkedIn posts because I which shows it’s working, indeed. So as lawyers, we’re we’re told to research things carefully and slowly, write something beautifully measured, get it checked and rechecked, and then finally, it gets published or sent out. Right? LinkedIn is a completely different beast. In order to get traction, you need to respond quickly. So my first tip is respond quickly. If you’re, if you’re, if you’re commenting on something which is news, then do it. Yep. You know. Really quickly. So during the budget, I was actually posting within about 90 seconds of an announcement being made during the budget, and I posted about 12 things on Budget Day. So be quick. Be authentic. Be yourself. Don’t try and be something you’re not. So don’t try and be super measured. If you’re not a super measured person, if you’re hot headed, just be hot headed, but just do it in a humorous way, and don’t be boring. That’s my final thing. Just don’t be boring. Don’t be don’t be frightened of having an opinion. And again, it’s a thing that does annoy me about lawyers, when they go, Well, on the one hand this, and on the other hand that, and you might think this, and you might think that, and you just think, just, just tell us what you think your Wally. Because the reason people come to experience, people for anything, if you like, is an opinion. So if I think the government has done something unutterably stupid, then I’m just going to say that’s stupid. I’m not going to say, on the one hand, say that’s not very wise. On the other hand, it could be. It’s like, I think this is stupid, and the reason I think it’s stupid is because of this. Now you may disagree with me, but I’m giving an authentic view, so I think for those senior enough to know what they’re doing, I’m not encouraging my associates to do this and my assistants, because you could say the wrong thing, but if you know what you’re saying and you’ve got an opinion, just say it. Just do it and and just don’t be boring. You know, even if you’re gonna impart some boring information, believe it or not, but using a bit of humour, you can make it entertain. Because I, by the way, one of my little offshoots of advice they give is on pensions. And whenever you say pensions law to anyone, they immediately fall asleep. So if you want to send someone away in a party, what do you do? I do pensions tax, they’re going to walk away pretty quickly. It’s a really great tip for getting rid of anyone at a party. But I do have to do the odd post on pensions. And you can make it funny, and you can make it interesting by just putting a bit of humour into what you’re saying. And you can get the same message across, and people will still read your stuff. So just that, they’re my three tips if you’re going to go on to LinkedIn, hope that helps.

Robert Hanna  42:12  

Yeah, no. Super great. And I always talk about edutainment like there’s a real market for that in terms of, you know, if you can get that right, you know, and entertain your audience, then the ones that are doing it are winning. I did lie because I’ve got a fine final question. Okay, because, you know, it’s rude of us not to ask, given how much you’ve achieved and what you’ve built with Stephenson Harwood and the amazing interviews and everything you’ve done, but perhaps for those thinking of coming into a career in private wealth, what would be one piece of advice you would give to those interested in pursuing a career?

James Quarmby  42:43  

Oh, that’s a horrible question. One piece of advice for ones coming to private wealth. Wow, that’s a, that’s a really, I mean, talk about sucker punch right at the end,

Robert Hanna  43:01  

exactly. But this is where we know we’re going to get real authenticity in the answer.

James Quarmby  43:05  

Well yeah, I’m always authentic. I authentically stumped. Now, don’t do it if you don’t like people. Yep, right? And because it’s if you want to succeed, if you want to really succeed and, you know, become a partner and stuff, but you’re not very good at dealing with people. There no areas of law that you can go into where you’re going to avoid them. I’m not going to say what they are, because I’ll be insulting some of my colleagues. But you know who you are. But if you’re gonna be a private client law and successful, you’re going to have to do a lot of cocktail parties and, you know, a lot of networking and all the rest of it. So, so my main piece of advice to anyone, any lawyer, really, is, is to understand what you enjoy. Going back to my journey, because I’ve got this love of economics and finance, moving into taxes really good for me. So it’s about being authentic again, to what you you’re not going to be a good private client lawyer if you hate people. And in the same way, you know, you’re not going to be a great litigator if you’re scared of conflict, be so my main point is that you will thrive in a role in the law if you’re smart and if you found the right role for you. So think carefully. So my main tip is Think carefully about what you enjoy doing, because you can’t change lanes in the law anymore. Yeah, gone are the days when you could be a general practitioner. Oh, yeah. I do a bit of probate. I do a bit of corporate, and I do a bit of this and a bit of that. Actually, you’re going to do it, all of it really badly you can’t change lane, so firms will force you to specialise. So if you’ve made a choice, you’re going to go into shipping law. I mean, God help you if you do. I don’t mean that actually, we do loads of shipping, but once you’ve done two or three years of shipping, or it’s really hard to get out of that and do something else. So if you’ve made the wrong decision at the outset, you’re going to regret it at length. So. So think carefully about what you do, what you enjoy doing, and what you see yourself doing in 2030, years, because it’s it’s hard to move out of that into something else. 

Robert Hanna  45:09  

Again, putting my legal recruiting hat on, it’s things I tell aspiring lawyers, practising lawyers all the time, you know, and I hate using the word niche. I don’t use niche anymore. I hate it. It’s a forensic focus. Clients are looking for you to be forensically focused in their lane, and that is where you need to own that level of expertise and why they’re buying your services. And ultimately, specific is terrific. The more specific you can be within that area of law and really specialise, the more you’ll rise to the top as that go to expert, this has been an absolute master class. James really enjoyed chatting with you, learning more about your inspiring career journey and the great work you’re doing at Stevens and Harwood, and indeed, what you’re getting up to on LinkedIn. If our listeners do want to know more, which I’m sure they will, what’s the best way for them to get in touch with you, feel free to share any websites, any social media handles. We’ll also share them with this episode for you too.

James Quarmby  45:54  

It is on LinkedIn. James cornby, and you can DM me, and I do actually keep an eye on my messages in LinkedIn, but thank you very much for asking me on to your amazing show.

Robert Hanna  46:04  

Yeah, no, it’s been an absolute pleasure, James. So from all of us on the leaders being podcast sponsored by Cleo, wishing you lots of continued success with all your experiences, careers and pursuits, whatever you get up to. And you’re a great artist, by the way, as well. I forgot to mention, James does some wonderful art, so definitely get connected with him on LinkedIn, but for now, over and out. Thank you for listening to this week’s episode. If you like the content here, why not check out our world leading content and Collaboration Hub, the legally speaking club, over on Discord. Go to our website, www, dot legally speaking podcast.com, for the link to join our community there, over and out.