TOM WHITFIELD Partner in the commercial litigation team at Hay & Kilner Law Firm in Newcastle, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year.
Which area of the law do you work in? My main area of practice is working on behalf of clients on negligence cases brought against members of the professional services community as well as dealing with disputes with insurers, but I also have significant experience of topics including partnership and shareholder disputes, contract claims, boundary disputes and landlord/tenant issues. Did you always envisage a career in the industry? The law is very much in my blood and family legend is that Sir Thomas More is a distant ancestor! I’m the fourth generation of my family to enter the legal profession, with my father having run the family firm in Yorkshire, and always loved the idea of legal problem solving and the processes of resolving cases in the courts. What has been your career path so far? After gaining paralegal and clerking experience at the family firm, I earned a training contract with Irwin Mitchell in Sheffield in 1995, qualified in 1997 and then, after marrying a girl from the North East, moved to join Crutes in Newcastle in 1999. Crutes was taken over by DWF in 2012 and I stayed for a further a further four years before joining DAC Beachcroft in 2016 and then moving to Hay & Kilner in 2019. What have been the biggest challenges you have faced so far? Earning and completing my training contract was important in enabling me to prove that I belonged in the profession without relying on my family connections. Working for large international law firms also presents its own challenges and I feel much more at home within a large regional firm like Hay & Kilner where you get to know and understand the individual needs and personalities of your clients and colleagues. Who do you most respect in your industry? Generally speaking, I respect lawyers who are straight, don’t try to play games and work towards finding resolutions to disputes as painlessly as possible for all parties. Individually, Helen Ager, who led the team at Crutes and then DWF, is a hugely impressive legal practitioner and person. Which fictional lawyer would you most like to meet? I’m not a particular fan of fictional lawyers as there tend to be too many inaccuracies which detract from the character and story, but I do enjoy reading the Shardlake series, a series of historical mystery novels by CJ Sansom set in the reign of Henry VIII and focused on lawyer Matthew Shardlake. What is your greatest strength? I like to think I have the broad shoulders required to do the heavy lifting on my clients’ behalf, reducing their worries about the whole process by providing analytical insight into what has happened/will happen and detailed advice on the optimum ways to proceed. What is your biggest weakness? Impatience with lawyers who choose to focus on points-scoring in court, rather than on their client’s needs, and forget that they’re there to try to resolve a problem, not just to make themselves look good. What are your remaining career aspirations? I want to see Hay & Kilner recognised as the Go To firm for professional negligence in our region. Having had more than 20 years’ experience of working on the defendant side of the argument, I’ve developed a detailed understanding of how the processes work and am aiming to build a team based around that degree of insight and practical knowledge. How do you see your industry evolving in the next ten years? The legal sector has become increasingly commoditised over the last decade, with clients understandably wanting to know exactly what they’re buying from their lawyers, rather than just paying an open-ended fee. I’d expect this sort of cost-consciousness to become even more common in litigation in the future and it’s an approach that Hay & Kilner is already taking in a number of areas, to help ensure transparency and value-for-money
