INTERVIEW with an Ex-Solicitor: Lomax Ward Aaron Rashid
Lomax Ward was a solicitor at Slaughter and May for five years, then started his own venture capital business called Outsized Ventures. Tell us a little bit about yourself - what do you do in your spare time / hobbies? I live in London and I’m 36 years old. I run my own business. Outside of work, I like to run ultratrail marathons, sail, ski, play golf, cook, learn languages (Italian, Japanese and Spanish) and read. What did you study at A-level and what degree did you do? Did you enjoy it? If you could go back, would you change your subjects/degree? At A-level, I studied Latin, Greek, French and Italian. I read Classics at Cambridge. I enjoyed all of these subjects immensely as I love to learn languages, as well as enjoying the breadth offered by a Classics degree. If I had to go back, I would have added in computer science. What do you do now? Now I am an investor at (and founder of) Outsized Ventures, a venture capital fund focussed on deep tech and science-based investments in Europe. We partner with the best founders in Europe building companies using the cutting-edge technology of tomorrow. Why did you choose this over being a lawyer? Do you miss being a lawyer? I was a solicitor at Slaughter and May for five years and spent most of my time as a corporate lawyer. The job was highly intellectually challenging, and I worked alongside some great people (I met my wife there!) and worked on
some interesting deals. There were elements of the work that I enjoyed, however ultimately as a corporate lawyer you spend your career executing other peoples' decisions. You are brought in towards the end of a process and are asked to deliver a lot of work in a very short amount of time. As a general rule (and there are of course exceptions), you advise a company for a snapshot in time (a fundraise, an acquisition, an exit, a joint venture) but once the deal is done, the company moves on and your interaction ceases. I was much more interested to get closer to the decision making and had always aspired to start my own business. Hence, I opted to move to a role as an in-house counsel and then transitioned to being a full-time investment professional, before starting my own business. As a founder of a business, I have the full responsibility of managing that, along with my two business partners. The risk I face is a lot greater now than when working in a highly paid role in a law firm, and the hours can be just as bad, but ultimately, I am much more invested in what I do, and I get a lot more enjoyment from that. I am building something, which would not have been possible within the confines of a law firm. A career in a law firm offers a lot: intellectually demanding work alongside very smart colleagues and clients, working on high profile transactions and, of course, it can be highly lucrative. However, it is a competitive market where you are selling time, so it can be very gruelling with long hours and a lot of very unglamorous work. As a junior lawyer you spend a lot of time doing fairly menial tasks - taking notes, building and reviewing data rooms, verifying documents etc. I don't miss being a lawyer - life is a lot more exciting now, blending short term challenges with the need to think strategically over the long term as we build our business. As a lawyer, you spend all of your time wrapped up in the deals you are working on and then catching up on sleep in the downtime waiting for the next deal to come along. The training from my law firm days was invaluable (the logical problem solving and delivery high quality work to demanding clients in short time frames are valuable life skills) but a career as a corporate solicitor is not for everyone and I am thus glad that I recognised this and made the move I did. I now derive further satisfaction and meaning from my career at Outsized Ventures.
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