Louise Thompson is a commercial contracts and data protection law specialist based in the Southampton office of the south of England firm Trethowans. She shares her daily routine with The Brief.

Last year I achieved a significant milestone in my career by becoming a partner in the commercial contracts team at Trethowans, a firm I joined as a newly qualified solicitor back in 2008.

I originally worked on both corporate and commercial matters, with a heavier focus on corporate work. However, in 2017 I embraced a new opportunity to work in a purely commercial role which aligned with the evolving needs of the business.

This shift proved to be the right move, as the predictability of commercial work allowed me to balance my professional and family life more effectively than the demanding peaks and troughs of corporate law.

Family life

My husband and I have two children, aged seven and three. Our older child, who has autism, ADHD, dyspraxia and anxiety, requires a stable and predictable routine, which we do our best to provide despite the organised chaos that often defines our household and the demands of work/life.

My husband, a fire fighter, works varying shifts, adding another layer of complexity to our daily lives. He was on a night shift last night, so today I had both kids to get up and ready for school and nursery before heading off to work myself.

My son's additional needs mean he cannot attend wrap-around care so either my husband or I always need to be around to pick him up (cue lots of planning and diary management, and thankfully the flexibility from work to do this as needed).

My husband finishing a night shift this morning means he is on school pick-up duty today and I don't need to dash out to do this and then log back on at home.

Ideally, one of us handles the drop-offs while the other takes care of the picks up, but it doesn’t always go as planned. On days when I manage both, I usually work from home in the late afternoon and into the evening to finish off my tasks.

Amidst the hectic schedule, I also try to make time for my regular Pilates class to get some time to myself.

Managing boundaries

Trethowans has six offices: in Bournemouth, London, Poole, Salisbury, Southampton and Winchester. I am based in the Southampton office, which fortunately relocated to premises just five minutes from our house around the same time we moved out of the town centre.

Having the office so close to home is incredibly helpful. While I appreciate the flexibility to work from home, I prefer being in the office to avoid the many distractions at home. I try to keep my work and home life as separate as possible, only working at home in the evenings when necessary.

Despite my best efforts to set boundaries, this doesn’t always work out. You don’t just get to switch off from being a parent between nine and five and today, for instance, I also had a call with my son’s school about how we can support his needs going forward, and what his future education looks like.

Many people assume that all the necessary provisions are in place to support children with additional needs but, in reality, it requires constant effort and chasing to secure those resources.

I am lucky that I am able to deal with matters like this alongside my workday but, in truth, you never get to switch off entirely either from work or home because the demands of being a parent of a child with additional and special educational needs are, quite frankly, an ever-changing and constant battle and I still need to get work out of the door to meet my clients’ needs and expectations.

Morning routine

My mornings at the office start with clearing emails and working out what I need to get done that day. I try to get started on those things before I get distracted by tasks that look like they will be a bit more interesting than whatever I’m meant to be getting finished!

Today I am working on a data processing agreement for one of our clients who is launching a new product internationally. Other things I have been working on recently include a new technology contract and a data protection agreement for a national retailer, and a vehicle leasing agreement for an international manufacturer.

Data protection

Since the introduction of the GDPR in 2018, I have developed a keen interest in data protection, which has become a dynamic and fast-paced part of my role. There are only a very small percentage of commercial contracts that don’t touch on personal data at all and data protection is now, by necessity, a critical concern for business clients.

Nearly every tech contract that we deal with will have a data element, and anything involving contracting for a payroll provider or HR support system, for example, will involve huge amounts of people’s data, some of it sensitive.

Business insights

What I love most about working in commercial contracts is the opportunity to deeply understand our clients’ businesses. One example might be leasing an HGV for a builder’s merchants, where I know that they will need to make modifications to the vehicle that aren’t permitted in the leasing company’s standard contract, so we will need to negotiate various additional clauses.

So it’s not just a case of reading a black and white contract – it’s thinking about how one thing will impact upon another for the client, operationally and commercially, and how to resolve those issues.

Our clients range from international household names to SMEs, but the majority are in the medium-sized space. Many, but by no means all, of them employ in-house counsel.

Although we are located in the South of England, many of my biggest clients are based in the Midlands. The shift to remote work post-Covid has made geographical location increasingly irrelevant, allowing us to connect with clients seamlessly via Teams.

The Forum

One of my current projects is The Forum, an initiative we developed to support in-house legal professionals through shared experiences and free training.

It has been a lot of work to get The Forum off the ground but the response and feedback we have received has been really positive. It’s identified a real need for this type of support for the in-house legal sector which, by all accounts, is growing year on year but can, particularly post-Covid and with the increase in people working from home, being a fairly solo endeavour.

We launched The Forum in July with a webinar for 60 members on key considerations for in-house legal teams in relation to the roll out of AI products within their businesses. We have a real mix of members including employment lawyers, commercial contracts lawyers and some are data protection specialists, so we chose AI as our first webinar topic because it really does impact on  all of them.

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Trethowans

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