Reed Smith lawyers Mahmuda Kamalee, Ravi Pattani and Akshay Sevak join host and international arbitration partner, Gautam Bhattacharyya, for a special episode to kick off this year’s SAHM celebrations. In this reflective conversation, our speakers share the inspirations that have shaped their careers and lives, lessons passed down through generations, the best advice they have received (to date!) and what heritage means to them.

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Transcript:

Intro: Welcome to Arbitral Insights, a podcast series brought to you by our international arbitration practice lawyers here at Reed Smith. I'm Peter Rosher, Global Head of Reed Smith's International Arbitration Practice. I hope you enjoy the industry commentary, insights and anecdotes we share with you in the course of this series, wherever in the world you are. If you have any questions about any of the topics discussed, please do contact our speakers. And with that, let's get started. 

Gautam: Hello everyone and welcome to the first of our Reed Smith podcasts to celebrate South Asian Heritage Month 2025. This year the theme of South Asian Heritage Month is Roots for Roots. And I'm delighted to say that for this episode I've got three of my very dear colleagues at Reed Smith as our guests. I'm going to briefly introduce them to you. And then by the end of this podcast, once you've heard them speak to the questions I will be putting to them, you'll realize what fabulous people they are, let alone what brilliant lawyers they are. So first of all, I will introduce Mahmuda Kamalee, Mahmooda is a newly qualified associate in the Global Commercial Disputes Group in London. and she is doing a broad range of work in a number of areas in that practice. Secondly, I will introduce Akshay Sevak, who is another associate in the Global Commercial Disputes Group in London. He too does a broad mix of work and he is, at the time that we're doing this podcast, he's halfway through his Higher Rights of Audience course. So by the time this podcast goes out, I'm sure he'll have a further set of titles to put after his email block when he sends you all emails. Last and definitely not least is my partner, Ravi Pattani, who is a partner in our corporate group doing a broad mix of corporate transactional work and is definitely one of the future leaders of that corporate practice. So delighted to see you all and have you all here. I'm looking forward to our discussion, and I don't want any of you to hold back, okay? So I want you just to let it flow and tell me exactly what you think about the questions I'm going to ask you, because you are some of the shining lights in our practice of South Asian heritage. So let me go straight into it and ask the first question, and I'm going to ask each of you this question. I'm not going to ask you all the same questions, but I'm going to ask you all a few of the same questions. The first thing I think is always interesting, because I know I've been asked this question so many times in the course of my career so far. Why did you choose law as a career? So maybe I start off with Mahmuda on that, please.

Mahmuda: Thank you, Gautam, for the lovely introduction. And I'm really pleased to be here with you all today. If I'm very honest, I can't actually remember a particular reason as to why I chose a legal career. And I know as a lawyer, we can shy away from saying that because there should be multiple reasons why we chose it. But I think my earliest memory of wanting to become a lawyer was when I was around 14 or 15 years old. And I recall we had a careers day at school where we were learning of the different roles and jobs in society that we could take on. And I was introduced to the idea of a judge, a solicitor and a barrister. And I just remember leaving curious as to what their roles were and the way in which their roles enabled them to achieve justice in different respects. And then from there on, I decided to research as I grew older into different work experience opportunities at law firms. I attended legal clinics and I attended other events for other jobs to see whether sort of my curiosity in law was shifted at all. And I'm really pleased today to say it wasn't. And all of these experiences enabled me to see how impactful legal work can be, both in a courtroom, but also in everyday lives. So this continued to reaffirm my interest in the field. If I look at it from a more academic perspective, I've always been interested in analytical thinking and subjects which emphasise written skills. So naturally, law stood out to me as a discipline, which combined these elements. And I particularly enjoyed doing a law degree. And like I said, the analytical thinking and the emphasis on written skills was the motivation behind choosing to study law at undergraduate level. And then I proceeded to seek a training contract at Reed Smith, which I was very lucky to get. And now here I am today as part of your wonderful team, having the opportunity to work with yourself.

Gautam: Well, thank you, my Mahmuda. Well, you know, I can certainly say that I've been a witness to your analytical skills and your drafting skills. So I'm very glad you made that choice. And I'm very glad that your curiosity was really brought about because we've got you. So thank you. So let me ask that same question to you, Akshay, please.

Akshay: Thanks, Gautam, and thanks for having me on this podcast. I don't mean it in any small way when I say it's a real honor and it's a real privilege to be able to share the stage with yourself, Mahmood and Ravi. So I think mine was, my reasons were a lot less structured than Mahmuda’s. I actually, so I grew up in Kenya and my plan, to be honest, when I was 16 was, when I look back at it, I was very much trying to become a professional pianist. I was going to go to music school and And then I decided when I was 16 that I didn't have the maturity to understand music in the way that you needed to do that. Certainly not at that age. And I thought, well, what else do I like doing? And I like talking, which is why I'm here. I liked the analytical subjects like history, English. I liked physics and maths quite a lot, the detail in that. And someone said, well, why don't you consider studying law? And I thought, well, I am coming from abroad. I probably should do something relatively rigorous to justify the endeavor to my family. So I came to law school and I just, I was so great because everyone was so, so smart. The work was really difficult. It was really interesting. And I just didn't appreciate until I started studying it that you really can sort of grasp and really grapple with so many different facets of life through this one medium. So when I was at law school, similar to Mahmoodo, I applied for vacation schemes and training contracts. I was so fortunate to land one at Reed Smith. And even to be honest, as my training contract completed, I really did think that it was time now to go back home. And there was no intention to stay on. And so when the department I'm now in, Gotham, your team, the Global Commercial Disputes team, offered me a job to stay on, And it was just very, very good luck. And so here I am now.

Gautam: Well, thank you, Akshay. And I mean, I know you still play the piano very well. But I'm also very glad that you chose law over the piano. And I'm also glad that you made London your home. So that's very good. Thank you. Okay, last but not least, I'd like to ask you, Ravi, the same question. So what brought you into the law in the first place?

Ravi: Thanks good to be here I wish I could say that I was like Mahmuda or Akshay and really thought about the career choice I was going to make and thought about my skill set and how that would complement the law but I was probably about 12 or 13 watching TV and seeing all these high-powered lawyers and suits and fancy offices and fancy cities around the world I thought oh that sounds like fun and I kind of just stuck to it and had no imagination to go for anything different to what what I thought I wanted to do back when I was a 12-year-old watching TV. I come from a South Asian heritage, like all of us here, and despite the regular view of your parents want you to be a lawyer or a doctor, my parents were very much against me being a lawyer and wanted me to be either a doctor, a dentist, a pharmacist, anything in the sciences. And so actually when they said, no, don't do law, it was actually almost like a weird rebellion. Given that it's law, It's quite a sensible rebellion, but it was a slight rebellion. And so I kind of just wanted to get into the career. And like Mahmuda and Akshay, and actually I did study law as an undergraduate, I actually didn't enjoy the undergraduate degree, so much so that I kind of didn't really put a lot of effort into thinking about my career and applying for roles and doing the vacation schemes. But thankfully, I had really good friends around me who encouraged me to apply for a vacation scheme. I applied to Reed Smith and the rest, as they say, is history.

Gautam: Well, I am very grateful to those friends of yours who gave you that nudge, really. Because in life, we all need a nudge now and again, right? You know, since we all share that South Asian heritage, as you said, it is interesting that point you made about how, you know, we study things, but there's a sort of perception of what we might want to do, what people think we ought to do. And sort of just finding our own way is so i