My legal life: Ayesha Vardag

Vardags Chairman Ayesha Vardag was interviewed by the Law Society Gazette in their “My Legal Life” feature.

She explained to the journal where her enthusiasm for law came from “My father and my grandfather before him were both politicians and lawyers, but I wanted to be a journalist or an actress and spent my time at Cambridge doing that. When the recession hit I bottled out of a bohemian existence because I didn’t have the financial backup to be able to afford not to work for long periods, and I was also attracted by international work and living, so I took a big money role in a City law firm and worked for them in London and Moscow.”

She went on to tell the Gazette about how this training helped her rise to the top of family law “My hugely eclectic legal background, from helping negotiate nuclear energy conventions at the UN (IAEA) in Vienna, to European law in Brussels, through corporate and financial work in Moscow and London, but equally the huge range of personal dramas and situations I’ve faced, have all given me the diversity of experience that means I have at least some understanding of pretty much anything any of my clients has to deal with.”

Speaking about where she feels family law is headed, she said “The future lies in the development of the private sector courts. Arbitration is already frequently used in commercial law and since that was extended recently to family law it is providing a meaningful alternative to the mayhem of the court system.”