Aymen Mahmoud on private credit, McDermott’s London merger, and standing out as a trainee

Shanaya: Hello everybody, and thank you for joining us for today’s episode. My name is Shanaya Kapoor and I am a host for LSE’s On The Case podcast, one of five divisions of the LSE Law Society working to execute our vision of increasing student awareness of the legal sector. Today I have the privilege of interviewing Aymen Mahmoud, managing partner of McDermott Will & Schulte’s London office and the firm’s European head of finance. Aymen brings a particularly broad perspective to the world of finance, having built his career at some of the city’s biggest firms, advising on some of the most complex debt transactions while also taking on significant leadership roles within the profession. In this episode we will be exploring Aymen’s career in commercial law, the breadth of McDermott’s finance practice, some major debates surrounding the private credit market, and the firm’s recent growth in London following its merger with Schulte.
 
Hi again, Aymen. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today.
 
Aymen: Hey Shanaya, and thank you for that unbelievable write-up. I must ask you to come and talk to some of our PR people and see if you can say these nice things about me all the time. Very kind, thank you.
 

Background and career

 
Shanaya: Before we delve into your work and the specifics of finance as a practice, it’d be great to hear about what drew you to the profession. Could you tell us about your journey into commercial law, and what specifically attracted you to finance as a practice area?
 
Aymen: Absolutely. I’ll start by saying that I wish I could tell you there was some beautifully constructed 20-year plan. There was not. I really started out in the study of law by talking to a careers advisor at school. They said I should study law, so I did what I was told and thought that was the right answer. From then on it just continued, sometimes with a little less of a plan and sometimes for other reasons. I started out with an attraction to the intersection of business and markets, and the idea that law is challenging and complex, but I didn’t really have a clue. I was very much on the outside of it.
 
Then I started as a trainee, and I lived somewhere between wild imposter syndrome and feeling like I had nil intellectual capability. It was pretty scary, and I think about that a lot when I’m talking to trainees. I can admit that, despite some advice I had at the time not to, I really over-indexed on the people around me instead of the subject matter. If you’re fearful and uncertain, you probably think you’re going to fail at everything. So how do you deal with that? What do you do when you’re a kid? You go to your parents. You go to the person who can teach you, help you, protect you. That was a big part of it.
 
Careers look a lot more linear in retrospect than they are while you’re living them, and that’s really how I ended up in commercial law. I can see that students are often under enormous pressure to optimize every decision when they’re 20 years old. I didn’t, and if I had, I would have been wildly wrong over and over again. Knowing that you might be wrong, and being willing to adapt, goes a long way. Hopefully that covers the journey into commercial law.
 
Why finance? I touched on the people aspect. But finance, for me, is the bloodstream of a transaction. You get to see what the business is worth, where the risk sits, who believes what, and what happens when people’s assumptions turn out to be wrong. I also knew what debt was. I’d had a student loan and an overdraft, so I got the concept without having to dig too deep intellectually. And I discovered fairly early that I enjoy complex negotiations involving large amounts of money and people who really disagree with each other, and really understanding the product. Either that is an excellent qualification for leveraged finance or something I should spend more time on with my therapist.
 
Shanaya: Thank you for that. That was a very interesting insight into where your interest began, and I think everyone can relate to the student loan bit. Given that you’ve worked at so many leading law firms in the city, and I think even gained some investment banking experience, how have those experiences shaped your approach as a finance lawyer?
 
Aymen: That’s a really interesting question, and one I’ll probably do a bad job of answering because it’s so wide and layered. The biggest takeaway I got was that the document isn’t the deal. One of the greatest dangers for lawyers is believing that because we’re drafting the documents, the documents are the centre of everyone else’s universe. They’re not. What I really started to learn was nothing about the law but plenty about client service and teamwork. Clients value judgment. They value responsiveness. They value an understanding of what really matters, and solving problems, not just identifying them. What does that mean? It means giving advice, and every client is different. That’s a very important part of it. No two clients are the same.
 
If I take that to its logical conclusion and ask myself what happens today, clients don’t ring me because they’re desperate for another beautifully drafted contractual clause. They ring for a whole host of reasons, but it’s rarely that. So from the totality of my experience, it’s understanding some of those nuances that I was clueless about before.
 
Shanaya: You’ve now held the role of managing partner at McDermott for a while. What drew you to McDermott Will & Schulte, and what do you think differentiates the firm from other US firms in London?
 
Aymen: Answering this one without sounding like a brochure… I could sit here and talk to you about league tables and growth, and I think we are truly differentiated there, but I don’t think that’s what I’d focus on if I were sitting in the seat of a brilliant young LSE or other university graduate.
 
When I first got to know the firm, what attracted me was that it felt like a place where people were still allowed to build. You could be not the finished product, and that would be okay. The idea that you’d be encouraged to build felt like a step too far; I was fearful but allowed. I had no idea what I was going to be able to do. I didn’t feel like I’d really been able to explore that or even understand it myself. If you don’t know how good you can be, the best thing that can happen to you is having people around who will help you find out.
 
Some institutions are really good at telling you what they’ve already become: we are the best at this, we are the best at that. I was attracted to somewhere that was asking what we could become next, and a firm that keeps asking that question every year, no matter how well you do. What happens next? Those things drew me in.
 
Working at a great firm helps enormously, but a platform is no substitute for entrepreneurship. Nobody hands you a career. No one gives you a client. You don’t get a reputation just because you joined the right firm, and if you do, it’s probably a bit of luck and not the norm. Every single person who did a training contract application struggled with the question “What makes you different?” It’s so hard to articulate, even if you know. I don’t want to sound like a terrible person, and there’s the imposter syndrome again.
 
So culture, I think, is the key differentiator of this firm. We’ve got extraordinary lawyers, but lots of firms have extraordinary lawyers, so that isn’t the differentiator. One of my brilliant partners sits on an NHS select committee; she’s amazing. Another is a Commonwealth powerlifter. These people aren’t just extraordinary at law, they’re extraordinary on so many levels. But the more interesting question is whether those lawyers actually like each other, whether they trust each other, and whether they instinctively want to work together. If you can combine that, it’s fiercely powerful.
 
From a personal or a leadership perspective, I’d rather have 20 brilliant lawyers who genuinely want one another to succeed than 30 brilliant lawyers operating as 29 competitors and one accidental colleague. Playing that through my experience since I joined, and how real it was compared to what I expected, I’ve learned that culture comes from the very top. I see the senior leaders of this firm look out for people, root for people, and make it their responsibility to accelerate others’ careers. Not just once or twice when things are going well and they’re not too busy, but all of the time. I don’t just love being part of that thinking and being involved in the leadership of it. I’m the byproduct of it. Throughout my entire career, people always gave me something, whether that was time, help, advice, support or patience, and I owe 90-plus percent of my standing today to that.
 
Shanaya: Coming to where your journey has led you, you’re now one of the senior leaders at the firm, serving as both European head of finance and managing partner of the London office. How has your role evolved from being a practicing lawyer to a firm leader?
 
Aymen: I want to give students some clarity on what I think is a misconception. Being managing partner didn’t suddenly make me more important. If anything, it made me more conscious of how much I depend on everyone else, and it scared me. It really scared me, and those around me in senior leadership know this because I talk to them about it all the time.
 
I want to be very clear about the genesis of these things. There are so many people younger than me, and more capable than me, of being extraordinary leaders. There’s no question about that. And if I loop back to your question about what sets McDermott apart, this is the firm that took the risk of putting somebody young in leadership. That’s the differentiator, rather than me.
 
What did the transition look like? It looked like being very scared, and having complete imposter syndrome, like I don’t know what I’m doing. It meant asking kind and smart people lots of questions all the time, but really it went from doing stuff to enabling. One thing I didn’t realize was that every single mistake I made would be multiplied by ten.
 
Pre-management, sure, I did some management things, but my job was: win mandate, negotiate transaction, do great work, advise client, work well with team. Now it’s all of that plus create the environment, remove obstacles, attract people, retain people, connect people, make people see and feel that they belong, and make sure others get opportunities, whether you’re creating those opportunities or helping people find them. The most satisfying emails I get to send are about how great other people are, and the best emails I receive are always about other people. Having colleagues with that quality and that kindness, when they’re as high caliber and brilliant as they are, is pretty amazing.
 
I was actually talking to some folks shortly before this. My old mentor is now one of my partners, and we were talking about how that relationship has changed. I don’t think it has. He’s still one of my mentors and I can still get perspective from him. If you have an organization of any kind that only works when a leader is in the room, that’s not leadership anymore; it’s dependency. We are so much better than that. I’m surrounded by leaders in every aspect of the business, and it’s a fantastic privilege to be in that seat.
 
Shanaya: Thank you. That was great insight into the firm’s culture, how supportive it is, and, like you said, how it lets talent shine.
 

Finance at McDermott

 
Shanaya: That’s a great segue into our next section, on McDermott’s finance practice. Your practice covers a remarkable range of financing transactions: direct lending, syndicated lending, restructuring, and a whole bunch of other more complicated words which I probably don’t know. For an NQ in finance, is it realistic to gain exposure to such a wide variety of transactions and sub-practices, or do people tend to specialize relatively early?
 
Aymen: Well, first of all, the words you don’t know were often created by lawyers to make themselves sound cleverer, so please don’t worry about that. I’ll try to keep the conversation fairly generic so I don’t lose people, but if anybody really wants to talk about the ins and outs of a particular area of financing, they’re very welcome to drop me an email and we can have a very geeky discussion separately.
 
Let me try to answer your question as best I can, by reference to anecdote, because you’ll get a sense of how my mistakes suddenly look like something I meant to do. They were not. When I started out, the global financial crisis meant lots of teams didn’t have anything to do, and that included my team. So I looked around, saw what was going on, and asked if I could help out teams that seemed busy. I learned to do other things mostly out of fear. This wasn’t some grand plan. It was: oh God, if I’m not doing anything I’m useless, and even more useless given I don’t really know anything, so I’ve got to find someone I can help somehow.
 
So I did lots and lots of work with lawyers who had an incredibly broad skill set and knowledge base, and I learned a huge amount. What really struck me was that I learned about learning. I learned that breadth of understanding helps you be a better specialist, and that understanding more things in more depth probably makes you a better commercial lawyer overall, or at least a better commercial pragmatist.
 
That’s against a backdrop in big law where there’s been an increased push to specialize early, because people are paying a lot of money in law firm fees and so on. I do worry that it’s led to an erosion of brilliance, and I worry even more that it leads people to define themselves too narrowly and too early. I did restructuring because it was all there was to do. Now people think it’s a great feather in my cap, but I didn’t do it on purpose. I did it because I didn’t know what else to do.
 
Breadth really matters because markets converge and products evolve. A restructuring can teach you how a document behaves under stress. Borrower work makes you better lender counsel, and vice versa. You understand a bridge much better once you’ve seen one collapse. Even then, you’ve got to remember that every client is different. We encourage people in our business to have that breadth as best they can, even within practice groups. The list of things you reeled off that I’ve worked on came to me by virtue of the people I got to work with and the skills I learned from them.
 
You don’t need to know at 20 or 25 what your professional biography will say at 45, and if you’re anything like me and you try, you’ll get it wrong. And that’s before we get to AI. If AI is really coming to give us a run for our money in every job as a lawyer, would you rather have a broader or a narrower skill set? I think that speaks for itself.
 
There’s also the commercial pragmatism that’s becoming an increasing part of being a lawyer. You’re something of a business adviser. At university there sometimes seems to be a view that in the best negotiations you win every point. I don’t think that’s right. It’s about understanding the five or six points that really matter. If I negotiate 87 points magnificently and lose the three that matter, that’s a terrible outcome for the client, and it could never look like a good day for me. Hopefully that gives you a sense of the value of a broad-brush understanding of what you’re doing.
 
Shanaya: Thank you. Speaking about breadth again, your practice has a broad range of clients: private equity funds, their portfolio companies, hedge funds and even banks. Do the different business models or commercial objectives of these clients influence the way you approach a financing transaction?
 
Aymen: Absolutely, no question. They’re all very different, and not just as an institutional matter; they can differ across an individual transaction. People often forget that a bank can be several thousand people. A fund can have multiple strategies it’s looking to operate, and as you build a relationship with a fund you might find yourself supporting more than one of them. Every client is different and every transaction is different, and the best lawyers are the ones who can figure out something that isn’t cookie-cutter and do something complicated.
 
That being said, if there are 100 deals out there and 20 are complicated and 80 are not, it doesn’t serve you well to drive complexity into the 80 that aren’t. That differentiation drives a true understanding of the commercial realities of what a lawyer is doing for a client. Some clients think, well, this is just a cost I don’t want. It’s friction between starting a transaction and closing it. So part of the job is to shepherd the client’s needs through, without getting fixated on some case that once happened about one perfunctory aspect of legal practice.
 
Shanaya: Is there a transaction for any of these clients that particularly stands out, and what made it memorable?
 
Aymen: It’s interesting. There are certainly transactions I remember, but not because they were the biggest ones, and I wouldn’t want to call out one client over another. Not because I think they’d mind, but because I don’t think it makes sense. The deals that are most interesting to me are the ones where something nearly went really badly wrong, and the team came together and really delivered.
 
I remember a deal where the associates had this wake-up alarm triangle. We were all working so late and were so worried we’d sleep in that everybody had to call everyone else twice to check we’d actually woken up and not gone back to sleep. I remember another where a senior associate who wasn’t even on the deal stayed up with me all night when I was a trainee, because I just didn’t know what I was doing. I remember fondly the takeaways we went to before delivery, and the Uber Eats orders we loved. The fact that those are the memories the teams and I still talk about suggests those are the standouts. Those moments are a useful reminder that clients might choose to hire a partner, but they experience a full team, and that full team is the key to delivering an outcome for a client.
 
Shanaya: Thank you. For a prospective trainee with an interest in finance or related practices, what do you think sets McDermott’s practice apart from other firms in the city?
 
Aymen: I’m not going to answer that as it relates to finance specifically, because I don’t think that exists, and trainees need to figure out what they like learning from most and what they enjoy experiencing most. I could sit here and say the same as every other brochure: market-leading work, friendly culture, international opportunities. I’m not going to do that. But it makes the question genuinely hard, not because I don’t know, but because everybody says they have the same things, and I haven’t worked at all of those places, so they might all be right. I don’t know.
 
If I were a trainee, I’d ask myself some hard questions. Not just “Will I work on good matters?”, because at this end of the market, of course you will. I’d ask: will people know who I am, internally and externally? Will someone invest in me? Will I get to sit in the room? Will people explain why we’re doing something, rather than just telling me what to type into an email?
 
One of our junior lawyers recently posted on LinkedIn, and I can say this because you can go back and fact-check me on timing, about our training contract applications. That person highlighted that partners here would know who the trainees are. On the one hand, it’s so sad that people wouldn’t have that. On the other hand, it’s funny to me, because it nails what counts for a junior lawyer: being seen. And it’s not just junior lawyers. Everyone wants to be seen.
 
We want exceptional technical lawyers, sure, but we really want people who develop judgment, relationships, and confidence. One of the key things we anchor to when we hire, not just at trainee level, is kindness. Your training contract isn’t going to be two years of proving you can survive being busy. I really hope that’s not the case. It’s the beginning of a career: making friendships, having experiences, making memories and learning. So I’d say to the trainee, it’s not just about “Why this firm?” but about what you’re going to make of it. If you show up with the hunger and desire to make the best of something, whether that’s your training contract, university, or a party where you don’t really get on with everybody or don’t know anyone, it’s always about what you make of the situation you find yourself in.
 
[Break in recording]
 
Shanaya: Great. I think that wraps up our section on finance at McDermott, and what you’ve given us is great for understanding the firm before people put in their applications.
 

Private credit

 
Shanaya: We can now move on to the next segment, which is the private credit market. We’ve learned and heard a lot about it in the FT, through podcasts and so on, and you are an expert in the field. Can you briefly explain what private credit is for listeners who may not have heard of the concept before?
 
Aymen: Yes, and this will be a good test of whether or not I talk nonsense. I’ll try to keep it simple and avoid jargon. At its simplest, instead of a company borrowing from a bank, and that bank then distributing its ownership of the debt through the market, private credit is where a private credit lender lends the money directly to the borrower and then holds it, without any distribution. It also holds the relationship. Everything after that gets a little more complicated, which is why people still need finance lawyers, but hopefully that’s a good starting point.
 
Shanaya: Absolutely. And how has the role of private credit evolved alongside traditional syndicated lending, which usually happens via banks?
 
Aymen: I’m going to give my personal view here, because it’s not shared by a great many of my colleagues and some practitioners out there. I think private credit has become the evolutionary next step of what was traditional bank lending. Partly because the global financial crisis drove increased regulatory scrutiny of the banks and changed things a little, but also because private credit brought other things to the market.
 
I’m not saying syndicated loans will die out. They will undoubtedly continue. But I think private credit will dominate and keep taking market share. Banks bring scale, distribution, ancillary day-to-day banking relationships and enormous pools of capital. Private credit brought speed, certainty, bespoke structures and the ability to hold rather than syndicate debt. And on enormous pools of capital, I think we can say private credit now provides that too; we’ve seen that over the last few years.
 
So for me there’s no doubt that coexistence, collaboration and convergence are all there. This isn’t some funky financing boxing match between private credit and the syndicated markets. Both will exist, but private credit now sits at the helm of the lending market, certainly in the mid-market space, where the vast majority of transactions are completed.
 
Shanaya: Got it. You also recently wrote an article for the FT, in case anyone wants to read it, which I believe is called “Navigating European Private Credit in 2026”. One of the points you made was that the current debate about private credit can be a little overly simplistic, and that it’s not necessarily temporary but, like you said, an evolutionary trend. What do you think are the biggest misconceptions surrounding private credit?
 
Aymen: I think there are probably two. There’s the view that if something is really big, it’s dangerous. That comes partly from what happened with the banks in the global financial crisis, so I understand it, but I think it’s a gross oversimplification. You’ve got to have a reason to believe something will fail, rather than just saying it’s big and therefore dangerous.
 
The other is that private credit is a single asset class populated by interchangeable players. The actors are hugely differentiated: across strategies, return thresholds, risk, sector or industry, seniority, and (to use a piece of jargon) hold size, and across documents. That deep differentiation exists.
 
There’s also a related idea that private credit grew solely because the banks retreated. Bank regulation certainly mattered, but borrower demand mattered too. Private credit has succeeded in no small part because borrowers discovered they actually liked the product, not just because the banks retreated.
 
Shanaya: As you mentioned, the industry has experienced extraordinary growth over the last decade. From your perspective, what are the key drivers behind this expansion?
 
Aymen: I hope this one is a little simpler, or at least my mind is simple on it. Markets grow sustainably when they solve a problem for both sides. Borrowers wanted certainty, speed and flexibility. Investors wanted yield, floating-rate interest, more negotiated document protections and some diversification. So, the growth is structural, not some fad. Supply and demand typically lead to growth: the more demand there is for something, the more supply will rise to meet it.
 
We now exist in a market where there’s a lot of private capital out there generally, and frankly that supports the argument, because it means people continue to seek the yield that asset class offers. That’s why it has grown the way it has. There are a lot of very smart people making these investments, and I don’t think they’re all wrong. They’re certainly smarter than I am.
 

Growth in London

 
Shanaya: Thank you. That’s a good segue into our next segment, which also focuses on growth, but McDermott’s growth in London. I think it was around this time last year that the merger with Schulte went live, and since then the firm has experienced significant growth in revenue and practice area expansion. How has the integration strengthened the firm’s finance practice in particular, and related offerings to private equity and other clients the firm already had?
 
Aymen: It’s just over a year, believe it or not, which is a little crazy when you think how quickly time passes. The temptation after a merger is to spend lots of time talking about how much bigger you are. Bigger is not inherently better. More useful to clients is better. Our firm slogan is “always better”, so that’s the starting point.
 
Here’s what I think changed. There’s a really exciting measure, which is simply the number of conversations we can have now that we couldn’t have had before: finance plus funds plus PE plus restructuring plus tax plus regulatory plus healthcare plus industry specialization. You don’t measure the success of a merger by the org chart. You measure it by whether there are two people in the business who didn’t know each other 18 months ago and are now winning work together, trusting one another with a client that one of them had and the other didn’t. That’s a strong signal of how well the integration is going.
 
What makes it easier for us is what the merger brought. Schulte brought extraordinary depth in private capital and funds; there’s no question they were market leaders. McDermott brought very complementary transactional, financing and sector capability. So the interesting part isn’t the addition, it’s the multiplication, and what you can bring to bear out of it.
 
Shanaya: McDermott has long been known for its strength in life sciences and healthcare. Has the merger created new opportunities to support clients in these sectors, particularly from a financing perspective?
 
Aymen: I’ll go further than financing, but healthcare is a great example of why having a genuinely multidisciplinary firm matters. A healthcare company doesn’t wake up on a Tuesday and decide it has a finance legal problem. It has a business problem that might involve financing, but might also involve regulation, IP, reimbursement or litigation. So yes, it’s created opportunities, because every time pre-merger businesses combine to add capability, you necessarily create new opportunities for clients on both sides. And it’s created opportunities not just in healthcare but across the board.
 
Shanaya: Got it. And from a trainee or junior lawyer’s perspective, what new opportunities has the merger created?
 
Aymen: Growing firms generally, pre- or post-merger, offer a ton of opportunity for junior lawyers. Growth creates white space. Every time you grow, you see white space start to emerge, and it allows smart thinkers to figure out where the gaps might be. We’re growing every day, and we’ve got big plans to continue that growth; we’ve been very public about it. It’ll need a lot of work from all of us, but it has a lot of meaning.
 
What is that meaning? New teams, but also new clients and new combinations. Less institutional rigidity. The opportunity for young people to take responsibility. There’s something massively exciting for any young lawyer joining somewhere that’s still being built, because they get to be part of the build. You never need to wait to be the most senior person in the room, or a partner, before someone asks what you think. I routinely steal other people’s bright ideas and try to put them to work or improve on them. I love doing it. It’s awesome that someone smarter than me came up with something and I can try to optimize it. That happens all the time. Juniors really have a big voice, they will become leaders, and now more than ever they’ll become leaders quickly.
 
Shanaya: So, their trajectory…
 
Aymen: Yes, it’s in the hands of their firm to some extent, or wherever they end up working. But now more than ever, it’s also in their own hands.
 
Shanaya: Speaking of future opportunities, looking ahead, what do you see for the London office and its finance practice in terms of new opportunities and new beginnings?
 
Aymen: I think we’ve got to continue to hustle. Across the competitive field there are so many phenomenal lawyers, law firms and talented finance practices, and their ability to go out, win business and create new opportunities is huge. If you keep walking at the same pace while somebody else is running, you’re going to get caught out and left behind. The pace of growth on the big law side of the profession, and frankly beyond it, is so significant that you almost have a responsibility to sprint as fast as you can.
 
What will the future hold? As I mentioned, I think we’ll see more of private credit’s hold on the financing market. But new types of financing will evolve too, and we’re already seeing that. What previously might have sat within a leveraged finance transaction now looks like an infrastructure finance transaction. That adaptability is really important, and it will be a key skill for lawyers of the next generation, and frankly the current generation, to be as successful as they can be.
 

Advice for students

 
Shanaya: Got it. That’s a great way to move on to the final section, which is often the most popular with our listeners: advice for students. You were a trainee, and you’ve now become managing partner at one of the city’s biggest firms. In your opinion, both as a former trainee and as someone who routinely works with trainees, what makes a great trainee, and what skills do you look for specifically in McDermott trainees?
 
Aymen: I don’t know if the answer will be really similar at every firm or really different across firms. I can tell you what we look for, and that what it has led to is something we’re really proud of and will fight to keep. What makes a great trainee: kindness, hunger, and then resilience and adaptability, which are fairly aligned with each other. Probably in that order. The trainees who impressed me most were the kindest ones.
 
We now take it as given that everyone is academically up to scratch, and that everybody has a very strong extracurricular CV. So what do those characteristics look like? Kindness is an easy one. Then curious people. People who are reliable. People who take ownership, which often means they don’t make the same mistake twice, because they feel strongly about the ownership they’ve taken. Someone who communicates, and communicates early. Someone who makes other people’s lives easier. Someone who tries to understand context, which I suppose overlaps with curiosity. And somebody who really wants their colleagues, and the other side, to succeed.
 
Technical excellence may get you into the profession, but it’s technical excellence at something else. What you learn in your studies is quite different from what you end up doing as a practicing lawyer. Eventually it’s about judgment, relationships and trust, and that happens far earlier than anyone thinks. A lot of what takes place later is built on those things. You start building judgment, relationships and trust with your training supervisor, or your graduate recruitment team, or whoever it is. Later it’s the same with your internal clients and the business professionals who support your growth. You might have a market leading BD team doing a huge job to keep you there, an internal coach, a therapist. Those people who support your growth are really supporting what will end up making you good at handling the eventual external client. That’s why I anchor to those characteristics. When you look at the most successful partners in a law firm, they’re the people who really did hustle.
 
That gets multiplied in the present world, because AI is going to make knowledge cheaper, and if knowledge gets cheaper, judgment, curiosity, empathy and communication all become far more valuable. That’s something AI cannot do, at least as things stand today. So you don’t distinguish yourself by pretending you don’t need help. You distinguish yourself by learning as quickly as you can from the help you get, and doing the same for other people. All of that makes really great trainees. The trainees I’ve had the privilege of working with have become close personal friends over the years. These are people I have unlimited personal and professional respect and admiration for, and I wouldn’t have that if I didn’t see kindness and…
 
[Audio gap]
 
Aymen: …lawyers can never do this with just one, right? So you’ve got to go and make things more complicated. And by the way, not just lawyers; clients do the same thing.
 
I would say be kind to people on the way up, and on the way down as well, meaning through your ups and your downs. Not the cynical idea that you might meet people on the way down, but because your career is long, any company is a community of people, and life is a lot nicer and more fun when people are kind.
 
Spend less time trying to look impressive and more time being interested and becoming interesting. Read widely, meet different people, be curious about business, politics, economics, technology, art, whatever you really get into. But also be curious about people. The best lawyers I’ve come across are interested in far more than law.
 
If you can become really excellent at what you do, and at the same time help the people around you become excellent at what they do, I think you’ll have a really great career. The further you progress, the less interesting your own successes should become. And you’ll have more fun.
 
For students studying law in particular, I think law students are conditioned to believe there’s always one correct answer or one path. One of the most alarming discoveries in practice is that there are often three reasonable answers, unreasonable people, and some crazy deadline they want you to hit before you can go to sleep.
 
[Audio gap]
 
Aymen: …show them a bit more latitude, a bit more kindness.
 

Close

 
Shanaya: Thank you so much, Aymen, for joining us today and for sharing your career insights and experiences. It was great to learn more about the firm, finance as a practice, and the private credit market. Like you said, it’s become such a big thing, so it’s great for us as students to get a simplified picture of what the industry actually looks like right now. Again, we’re very grateful for your time, and we look forward to staying connected and maybe even having you back in the future.
 
Aymen: I’ll look forward to coming in and paying you a visit, and I’ll bring some of the team along, of course. Thank you, Shanaya, for the opportunity. When I was doing my training contract, afraid of my own shadow, I never thought I’d be doing something like this, so it’s a real privilege to talk to one of the top universities in the country and to do this with you. Thanks for having me.
 
Shanaya: Thank you so much.