Publication
Publication
As well as having a varied international legal career, Fiona is a yoga teacher(@bionic_rocket_woman) and has taken part in a TEDx talk. She recently started her first assignment with Re:link.
The Re:link platform appealed to me as a way to help me re-establish myself in the UK legal market after living abroad for so many years. A huge advantage of Re:link is that I get to try different work environments and jobs, allowing me to work out what direction I want the next part of my career to take. So far, it’s been great from an upskilling perspective. I’m getting to use the skills I’ve built up over the past 20 years, but at same time, the role I’m in just now is different from what I did in Asia, which is great for learning.
There are a lot of other lawyers in my family. In particular, I had a very inspiring aunt (my dad’s sister). My Auntie Pat had six children but when she met her husband, she had to give up work as in those days in Ireland married women weren’t allowed to have jobs. Auntie Pat’s husband became a successful lawyer and then after she had her sixth child at the age of forty-two, she decided she wanted to go back and study law too. So she did it. Auntie Pat went on to become a successful barrister.
There is an amazing black and white photo in her house that has always stuck in my mind, which shows her the day she qualified in the early 1980s. In the picture she has her barrister’s wig on, is smiling widely and is surrounded by all 6 of her children, my youngest cousin Edwina (never forgotten), still only an angelic looking toddler in her arms. I didn’t think much about that picture when I was younger as Auntie Pat had always made what she had done seem so graceful, effortless and ordinary, but now I know first-hand what it’s like to be a female lawyer and mum, I am in absolute awe of everything she did, especially back in the 1980s when there were definitely not the sorts of amazing female role models we see around so much today.
The rest is history, I guess. Auntie Pat’s aplomb in carrying her barrister and mothering career off with such panache rubbed off on me, helped me to believe I could do it too, and here I am!
After University I went to Japan to do the JET program (Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme UK). JET is the Japanese Government's long-running international exchange and English-teaching programme. I was placed into a village, which had only about 20,000 people in it. It was the year 2000, the internet was ropey, and I had a hard time using chop sticks! It was a tricky adjustment, and I was homesick at the start but overall, it was an amazing time, and I loved it, mostly because it really opened my eyes to different paths that could be open to me both career and life wise. After that year I came home and did the Law conversion course, with a better idea of the type of career I wanted. International!
I joined Watson, Farley & Williams because it was an international firm, and I knew I would have the opportunity to do a seat in a different country during the training contract then, in 2005, I qualified into the Litigation department. I loved Litigation, it made sense to me; people had problems and you helped them to fix them, and I got on well with the supervisor I had in my first litigation seat in London. Litigation was also the main focus of the work I did on my seat abroad in Bangkok, and I loved that too, especially one super exciting all-nighter I had to do which culminated in me having to fly to Kuala Lumpur the next morning to file some proceedings; I loved the adrenaline!
Unfortunately, the Bangkok chapter didn’t end too well. At Christmas 2004 my boyfriend flew out to see me and we went on holiday together to Krabi where we got hit by the Asian Tsunami. I lost my leg that day but was extremely lucky to escape with my life, largely thanks to my colleagues from the Bangkok office of Watson, Farley who rescued me in a very dramatic fashion from Krabi hospital a few days later. I’m incredibly grateful to them to this day.
Once I’d recovered, I went back to work and qualified. I wanted to stay active and turn the experience into something positive. I got into cycling and did a few charity bike rides. One of the rides was to raise funds for a charity I found in the UK that trained prosthetists and orthotists in Cambodia. When I was pregnant with my second daughter, I also got into yoga. At the time I was working in Hong Kong for a bank, and I found yoga helped me to de-stress. Later, I became a yoga teacher after really falling in love with the practice.
I’ve loved having a variety of experiences working in different countries. After Watson, Farley & Williams I moved to Hong Kong to work at Freshfields for a few years before then moving on to Barclays in Singapore as their first ever litigation and investigations lawyer for Asia. I loved the in-house life and learned an incredible amount there but 4 years later a Head of Litigation role came up at Bank of America in Hong Kong and so in 2014 I moved back there. I stayed at Bank of America for nearly 5 years and then, after I gained my first Yoga teaching qualification, decided to move to McKinsey & Company to run their litigation and investigations team for Asia and to see what working in a different industry was like.
I worked at McKinsey until 2023 when I moved back to London with my kids. It was a great 16 years in Asia but by that time it was even better to be home near our family and old friends.
Sure. After the tsunami, I had made the very deliberate decision to try and live as ordinary a life as possible but then in 2017 a friend of mine, who was on the committee for a new TEDx women’s event, asked me if I would be interested in speaking at it. At first, not knowing much about TED events and having been so quiet about what had happened to me for so many years, I was hesitant. The tsunami was such an awful thing and so many people lost their lives that it felt like without a good reason I shouldn’t be exploiting my story without good reason, but my friend convinced me that doing this talk would be of value and interest for other people, so I did it.
The day turned out to be amazing, and actually, this is what prompted me to start my yoga teacher training. The TEDx talk was out of my comfort zone, and once I had done it I thought “okay I’ve done that, what’s next?” and I started to believe I could do a lot of other things too. Life is a series of small steps after all, isn’t it?