10 years

It has taken me 10 whole years to be capable of writing this blog post. Ten years of fairly regular remembrance of a time and place that now seems even more unbelievable than it did while it was occurring. For 3 and a half years, between May 2002 and December 2005 I worked for Claims Direct. Actually, to be more accurate, for 90% of that time they were correctly called Claims Direct in Administrative Receivership and were under the governance of Deloitte & Touche Receivers.

From the get go, I realised this was not a normal workplace. My previous role was with a London law firm, based in the heart of the City square mile, very formal, full of old school process, tradition and observed rules. The contrast between this and the workplace I was now to experience could not be more wildly different. You have seen The Wolf of Wall Street right? This was the legal sector version of that. I kid you not.

I should state, my employment was never meant to be anything more than a maternity cover for 9 months to a year. I never got a hand over with my predecessor though because by the time I had arrived from London she had left, I cannot remember now whether this was due to early arrival of baby or not, I just remember feeling utterly thrown in at the deep end. I had gone from PA to two solicitors in a busy but quite mundane law firm to being PA to 1 Director of a legal department. A fucking crazy legal department.

I spent the first few weeks literally sat on my own in an office space that was physically on the other side of the building from the rest of the legal department. My desk was outside the large, flamboyant office of the ‘Head of Legal’ who was my new boss. But he was not around. He was on some kind of large scale tour of the UK having meetings with the law firms who were Claims Direct’s key delivery partners.

So during my ‘induction’ I read through some scant handover notes my predecessor had left and I had a series of batshit conversations with a woman who nobody seemed to know had been employed. She was apparently a shithot lawyer but she was also mad as a box of frogs, wore 80s make up (like serious blue eyeshadow, tons of it) and because nobody had any work for her to do she spent her days with her feet up on the desk reading Danielle Steel books and occasionally stopping to talk to me. Her office was the opposite one to my bosses and my desk sat in between the two rooms. She had only been in post a few weeks and I think she was just relieved to have somebody to talk to. I NEVER established, in the craziness that followed, what it was she was employed specifically to do.

Also during my first few weeks, one particularly arrogant legal hotshot decided I should be her personal secretary and dumped a pile of files on my desk along with a dictation tape. She wanted me to do her audio typing seeing as I must not have much to do. I complied, it was better than counting paper clips for another few hours, but this was a mistake as she then, for the rest of her tenure, treated me like her own personal typist. Despite the fact there was an ACTUAL POOL OF TYPISTS in her department who were there to provide this specific service.

Anyway, one random afternoon a few weeks in, I got a phone call from my new boss. He was, as he had been on all of our conversations to date, in his car at the time. The crux of the phone call was that he would like me to organise a conference for 200 delegates for the beginning of July. I had about 5 weeks in which to organise it. From a standing start and with no idea who to invite or what it was for or actually anything to go on at all. It is fair to say I was a little panicked by this request. In later months it would seem actually hilarious and a tad sinister that I was asked to do this because the Directors of Claims Direct clearly knew some key pieces of information whilst I was booking this event which rendered it utterly pointless.

I remember having a conversation about this event with one of the Legal Case Managers. She was actually one of my saving graces during my time here – a genuinely down to earth, awesome, funny, strong woman. She gave me the guidance I could not get from my actual boss, some pointers for who to invite, what needed to happen and expectations for such an event and I think without her I would have probably quit on the spot.

The conference itself happened on 1^st and 2nd July. I remember this because I remember that I had to head to the conference venue on the Sunday afternoon which was the 30^th June. It was the first time I had had any involvement in an event on this scale. It was kind of exciting. Most of the legal managers had also arrived on the Sunday. I remember being excited at having my own hotel room and being catered for as a corporate guest for the first time. In years to come I would look back on this experience and realise how different it was from any other conference I would attend afterwards. Like most of my experiences with Claims Direct it was formative and unusual.

For two days the champagne literally flowed as the senior managers and directors wined and dined this large group of Solicitors. Mostly these were named partners of law firms from all over the country. They played tennis and got massages and had ‘sessions’ around personal injury claims and context so that the whole thing did not look like one big jolly. Which is very much what it was.

I remember taking a call from the venue, an expensive retreat style hotel in the midlands, on the Friday of the same week, asking where to direct the final bill and bantering with them about the extent of the bar bill, which I knew must have been impressive. Little did I or the hotel know that the following week, on Wednesday 10^th July, Claims Direct would go into Administrative Receivership.  

I never saw my boss again. He had briefly appeared in the office in the few days after the conference but was due to be back on the road during the week when this news broke. Indeed, on the morning of the 10^th July I took 3 calls from media reps looking for comment on the revelation before any official news was announced. I was, of course, as always, sat a million miles away from the rest of the department as the news broke and crazy lady and I were visited by an increasing number of panicked looking managers who were desperately seeking my (absent) boss and some clarity.

Mid-morning my phone rang and it was him. He was, as always, in his car but he sounded far more sombre than usual. He did not mince his words, simply stating that he would not be coming back to the office. Ever again. He asked me to help his deputy pack up his personal affects when she came round and wished me all the best. I had been his PA for approximately 8 weeks at this point and had seen him in the flesh a handful of times. I was slightly shell shocked when I got off this call but at least one thing was clear. Claims Direct was in the middle of a shitstorm.

I did not expect to keep my job. There were a number of reasons why – I was on a temp contract for maternity cover, the Director I was PA to had walked, I had no reason to believe I would make it past the weekend. Somehow I stayed in post for another 3 years. I watched 250 staff dwindle to around 20 who stayed the distance. I watched people lose their minds in the boredom, low morale and malaise that comes with running a company into the ground, milking a cash cow for the last drops of cream.

Over the next few blog posts I will tell the story of what happened during the craziness of those 3 years as the world of Personal Injury claims was forever changed by the outcome of one major legal case and as those of us on the ship as it went down tried to stay sane.