The Spirit of Enterprise 25 years of Watson, Farley & Williams

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Chapter 4: Downside of success Partner retreat 1982 Minories House, 1988
1990 The Spirit of Enterprise August Iraq invades Kuwait, leading to the Gulf War. 1991 June Boris Yeltsin is elected President of Russia. 1992 April John Major wins the UK General Election. 1993 January Bill Clinton is voted President of the United States. 1994 May The Channel Tunnel opens. 1995 May Jacques Chirac is elected President of France. 1996 August The Prince and Princess of Wales are divorced. 1997 May Tony Blair wins a landslide UK General Election. 2000 January Y2K passes without widespread computer failure. 25 years of Watson, Farley & Williams “We were riding the crest of a wave.” As Watson, Farley & Williams entered its second decade, this was the assessment of the firm’s position by founding partner Alastair Farley. It seemed too good to be true, and it was. The heady growth of the 1980s and the early 1990s, which saw fee income double in the space of two years to reach £28 million, was not matched by attention to the firm’s direction or financial foundations. The background to the opening of a Moscow office showed the firm at its best and its worst. A high-level contact within the Soviet shipping ministry cultivated over many years by Alastair Farley yielded rewards in the late 1980s as the Soviet Union, in the process of collapsing, endeavoured to commercialise its fleet. That resulted in the financial independence from the Ministry of Merchant Marine of the USSR’s international shipping organisation and the ship-operating companies located all over the USSR and in the newly emerging republics. Almost overnight, there were more than a dozen potential new clients. Watson, Farley shipping partners took off to the far corners of what had been the Soviet Union, from Riga in the west, to Murmansk in the Arctic north, Vladivostock in the far east and Odessa on the Black Sea, in pursuit of new business. “It was an excellent example of our buccaneering spirit,” says Alastair Farley. It seemed only natural that this would be followed up by creating an office in Moscow. Other foreign law firms were falling over themselves to open in the Russian capital. Watson, Farley & Williams followed suit, opening in October 1993. It was not an 17
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The Spirit of Enterprise 25 years of Watson, Farley & Williams

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