From sweet shop to securitisation: Louise Keary on career, risk and never regretting a thing

Ask Louise what she wanted to be at 12 and the answer isn't law. “I thought I wanted to own a sweet shop,” she says. The legal bug bit a year later, when she was caught reading a legal article under the covers with a torch after being sent to bed. “I knew it was a thing,” she says. Neither parent was in the profession , which she thinks has become more common place : “It's far more diverse now, which is great, because you get more people with different skill sets coming in and  different points of view to problem solving.”

Her advice to students weighing up a law degree against a conversion course is pragmatic rather than doctrinaire. She values having studied constitutional law and jurisprudence, understanding how legislation is actually put together. But she's quick to add that some of the strongest candidates she's interviewed came from entirely different backgrounds. “You need a combination,” she says. If she'd done anything else, it would have been history.

After a paralegal stint at Cadwalader in capital markets (“I just thought, this is exactly what I wanted”), travel, law school and then a training contract at Clifford Chance, Louise deliberately chose the corporate trust route, not because it was the most niche  seat but because of its scope. “It effectively opened me up to virtually every other department that Clifford Chance had,” she explains. “I ended up getting a very broad range of product knowledge, and because it's transactional and advisory, it provided exposure to the best of both worlds.”

Her advice to junior lawyers choosing seats still holds: sometimes the less fashionable, longer-hours seats are often where the most interesting work and the best exposure sit. “If you go somewhere where people don't want to do it and you really do want to do it, you're more likely to get more complex or high profile  work.”

A theme that runs through the whole conversation is the value of  being present and willing. “Some of the best pieces of work I got given as a junior was just because I was open to it ,” Louise recalls. “If there was  hair-scratching and steam coming out of ears,  I'd walk past and say, ‘are you okay?’ Then you find you're involved in something fantastic that you see in the FT the week after.” Her message to trainees was always the same: be seen, be curious, ask if you can help. Even if the answer is no, people remember who offered and their interest.

She's equally direct about the limits of pure technical excellence. “The technical is a given,” she says. “It's your human that's actually going to  get you in the room and get you staying in the room.” That extends to networking, something she thinks younger lawyers underrate, often out of a misplaced worry that they have nothing interesting to say. “You have lots of other skills and interests that, on a human level, people will be interested in. It doesn't have to be all about the work.”

Louise's move to Law Debenture followed a sabbatical after nearly 10 years as a partner  at Clifford Chance. “I'd never really had any appreciable time out without a young child attached to me,” she says. The reflection that followed was clarifying rather than unsettling.

Asked whether she has any regrets about the trade-offs of a long private practice career with four children, her answer is unequivocal: “I don't believe in regret and my children have seen one version of a role model first hand.” She's candid about the reality, though: “Someone remarked to me once that women make great multitaskers, and I said a lot of the time that's because they have to be. “You end up promising yourself to everyone, and invariably the sacrifice was myself.” Her strategy was to protect weekends and big family moments where she could, while accepting that private practice often means spending more time with colleagues than family. “That is just the reality that you have to accept, and it comes with hard work, but also privilege.”

Pushed for a proudest moment, Louise doesn't reach for the deal that won an award. She describes sitting on her kitchen floor in the middle of the night during a major  acquisition, coffee in hand, laptop balanced, pulling together a call with senior partners scattered across the firm. “Everyone's probably in their pyjamas, and yet we've managed to get everyone  needed,” she says. “It wasn't necessarily the accolade of winning deal of the year. It was: this is a great cohort of people gathered to help each other out.”

The career moment she'd point to as most formative, though, was her in-house secondment. “It opens up that lens, that breadth, that different evaluation of need,” she says, and it's advice she still gives junior lawyers without hesitation: if you're offered a secondment, take it.

The conversation turns, inevitably, to investing, a subject close to Law Debenture's own financial education work. Louise's first real investment was a house,. But the investment she comes back to as the one that really stuck with her is her pension, precisely because she neglected it at a time of market stress. “I knew it was happening, but I just didn't take stock and think, well, what about me?” It's a blind spot she thinks is common among people working in finance and law, who spend their days advising on exactly the kind of decisions they put off making for themselves.

Her advice to anyone, , particularly who feel they don't have the time or vocabulary to get started: ask questions, however basic they seem. “Some of those may appear  stupid, but they're not stupid for you to ask if you need clarity.” She's also pragmatic about AI as a research tool: useful for groundwork, but anything that matters should be checked by a professional. For bigger decisions she'd use an adviser rather than go it alone, in contrast to her son, who manages his own investments through  apps with a five-year plan of his own. “I'm probably  more risk averse than he is, , but that’s also as it should be - reflective of the different stages we are at in our lives.”

The through-line, for her own children and for younger colleagues, is that disinterest is a valid starting point but not an excuse. “That might be your answer, but don't lose out on account of it.”