Eleanor
Harcourt KC

Eleanor Harcourt took silk in 2012 and founded this firm three years before that, with Julian Vane and four other lawyers, in one room on the second floor of the building we now occupy entirely. She had spent fifteen years at a large City firm and had reached the conclusion, she says, that a disputes practice does not scale: the work is done by the person who has read everything, and there is a limit to how many things one person can read.

Her practice is commercial litigation of the heavier kind — shareholder disputes, insurance and reinsurance coverage, warranty claims following acquisitions, and the occasional professional negligence claim against people she knows. She appears in the Commercial Court and the Court of Appeal, usually led by counsel and occasionally alone, and she has conducted eleven trials of more than four weeks. Three of her cases are cited in the current edition of the standard textbook on aggregation, a fact she describes as “a mixed compliment to the drafting of reinsurance treaties”.

She reads the documents first and the pleadings second. Clients report that the first conference is usually shorter than they expect and the second is much longer. She has a settled dislike of the phrase “commercial solution”, on the ground that it is generally used to mean paying money to end an argument that could be won, and an equally settled belief that most cases should not be tried.

Eleanor read law at Downing College, Cambridge, and took the BCL at Oxford in 1993. She was admitted in 1994, made partner at her previous firm in 2002, and appointed King’s Counsel (honoris causa) in 2012 for her work on the reform of disclosure in the Business and Property Courts, on whose working party she sat for four years. She is a Bencher of Lincoln’s Inn. She has edited The Ledger since its first issue in 2010 and has never missed one, including the issue that appeared eleven days after her second child was born.

She is the firm’s senior partner and chairs its two-hour Monday meeting, which she has never once allowed to run to two hours.