Alan Mason
The Navigator
Judgement in the fog, money, risk and the call others cannot make.
Alan Mason emerges in this interview as a Navigator, steering Freshfields through the complex convergence of global legal markets with deliberate, ground-level presence rather than remote direction. Mason describes relocating to San Francisco during COVID, requalifying for the California bar at Managing Partner level, and building consensus across 490 partners rather than issuing top-down mandates.
“And the mystique, I think, to the outsider is what's the advice that is most valued by those clients? It's a great question. Secret source of any law firm or any organization. So what makes us special? No, what our clients are looking for is, I believe, three things. It's a mixture of, of course, legal advice.”
“We've recently entered also into a partnership with King's College in London to give all of our graduate recruits the opportunity to do an LLM there on AI in the law, for example, because we know that The partners such as myself, it will take us longer to get our heads around new technologies.”
“I was very lucky when I started the firm it was the back end of the build out of our European network and we were doing exactly the same thing when we could do when we could deal with a particular issue in the UK we were excited about how would that issue get solved in Italy, in Spain in Germany so there's a sort of this core part of our…”
“Since, other than regular visits back to the UK and then relocating to the US. I feel very much at ease in both Paris and London. I think it's a nice summary of both cities. I like both sides of them. So before we get to law, if I've understood it correctly, you joined Goldman's for a year as well.”
Money Maze Podcast: “What Does It Take to Run One of the World’s Most Powerful Law Firms? With Alan Mason, Global Managing Partner, Freshfields”
LISTEN AT THE SOURCE ↗THE RECORD IS CHECKABLE