Gautam Bhattacharyya welcomes Eunice Shang-Simpson (arbitrator, mediator, and lecturer-practitioner) to discuss her career journey, including key roles as a prosecutor, policy advisor, and practitioner. They explore her career highlights, transformational moments, and inspirations, before discussing the challenges and opportunities for improving parity and access in the legal profession, and how the industry can evolve to support future legal professionals.

----more----

Transcript:

Intro: Hello and 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 back to our latest edition of our Spotlight on Arbitral Insights podcast series and I'm delighted to have with us today as my guest the fabulous Eunice Shang-Simpson. Hello Eunice.

Eunice: Hello Gautam, thank you very much for that.

Gautam: It's really good to see you and I'm going to introduce you like I always do and in these things my challenge with introducing you, is to try to keep it to a manageable amount because you're such an illustrious person. But I'm going to try and do this as summarily as I can. So for our listeners, Eunice, apart from being a great friend, is an international arbitrator, mediator, and speaker. Eunice was formerly a council member of the Law Society of England and Wales. She is currently a lecturer practitioner at Canterbury Christ Church University in England and has recently achieved her PhD. Many congratulations again on that, Eunice. A superb achievement. And we'll touch upon your PhD thesis in the course of our podcast. She focuses in terms of her practice in international trade and investment arbitration, including investor state dispute resolution. Eunice is a member of the Ghana Bar, as well as being a solicitor advocate here in England and Wales. And she truly is, as I said in the course of my introduction a while ago, very illustrious. She also has experience of being a Crown Prosecutor and advising on policy. She, as I mentioned, is also an academic and we'll touch upon that in the course of our podcast. One other thing, and the great thing about doing these podcasts is we get constant updates. And just on this morning of this podcast, just before we were about to record this, I noted the wonderful news that Eunice has been made a Freeman, but I'd like to say a Freewoman or a free person of the Worshipful Company of Arbitrators. And that was further to a ceremony last week in London at the Mansion House that's a really wonderful accolade Eunice and that really is it's just so well deserved. I saw the photographs and uh and you know and I must say your outfit was absolutely stunning I've got to tell you, you wore traditional clothes. Absolutely you were looking wonderful I've got to tell you. So thanks again for being on and I'm much looking forward to our podcast, Eunice.

Eunice: Thank you, Gautam. That's amazing. Thank you for that introduction. It's such an honor. Thank you very much for inviting me.

Gautam: No, thank you. Now, let's start with how you found law or how law found you. So why don't you tell our listeners what first drew you to the law?

Eunice: Well, I've always been insatiably curious, I must say, since I was a child, always asking why, why not, and stuff like that. I'm the eldest of three with two younger brothers. I grew up with a close family and spent lots of holidays at my grandparents' home in Ghana in Cape Coast with several cousins. And I always seemed to be the one prepared to negotiate, you know, later bedtime hours, extra treats for everyone. Why not this trip? Why not that trip? So after a while, the grown-up started to say, well, I bet she'll be a lawyer. She's always arguing. And it kind of became a backdrop to my thinking without my being conscious of it, actually. The only lawyer I knew growing up was my grand-uncle, lawyer Sakiskek, who was a lawyer and a politician in Ghana. He was always very encouraging and supportive of me. So I guess I wanted to be like him when I grew up. And that's how it all started.

Gautam: That's amazing. Thank you. you and you know I’ve got to tell you you know looking back to when i was a student many years ago it just reminds me one of my most impactful lecturers that I ever had was a lawyer who also became a QC as it then was here but who was from Ghana and he was a lawyer too his name was Frank Panford and and Frank he taught us well he taught me the law taught but he also taught conflicts of law. And he was a brilliant legal mind. And I remember as a much younger man in my teens, this is back in my late teens when he was teaching me, I just remember how impactful he was. And so that just came to mind. I mean, it just shows these podcasts are not scripted, they flow. But look, thank you for that. And so in the course of your wonderful career so far, who who have been your career mentors and your biggest inspirations?

Eunice: Oh my gosh so many because where do I start? Shout out so I warn you there's so many and I've been incredibly incredibly fortunate in having so many mentors and inspirational people in my life my career I must say so first of all I shout out to Willaim Fugar who's the founding member, Fugo & Co. in Ghana, my first ever boss straight out of law school. And then also Elizabeth Howe, who was my first Chief Crown Prosecutor, who’s now a dear friend. Mike Kennedy, who was president of Eurojust when I was working at our European and International Policy Division, CPS headquarters in London. And Lord Peter Goldsmith KC, who we used to brief on policy matters when I worked at EID in London, when he was Attorney General. He was hugely inspirational. He managed to understand our brief so quickly and get to the bottom of it you know when you brief somebody and they just cut straight to the chase and you think oh my gosh he totally got this and he's been on a flight from the U.S. when we sent that by email I'm thinking he's actually taken all this on board so does he not sleep you know it was that kind of inspirational person. And then also the first chair of my supervisory team Professor Chris, Chris Beighton, he believed in me from the very first time I spoke to him about my PhD topic. We were on a panel in Arusha in Tanzania and he asked me, what are you doing? And I said, well, I just finished my LLM and I'm thinking of doing my PhD, asking my topic. And he's been really inspirational to me. Also the late Stephen Denyer, who was Director of Strategic Relationships at the Law Society, another hugely inspirational person in my role as Chair of the International National Committee and Chair of the Arbitration Working Group for the Law Society, it was always very encouraging to me. And most recently, my Dean and Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the University of Canterbury Christ Church, Professor Mohamed Abdel-Maguid. He's been incredibly supportive and inspirational in the short year that he's been my boss. So yeah, quite a few people. Each of them has definitely, in their own way, been an inspiration and also been a mentor. kind of, you know, when people... Sometimes I describe this to people as when you think there's a wall and actually there's a door, you don't even know there's a door that needs to be opened and people are there to open that door. I've just been incredibly, incredibly fortunate and I'm so thankful for that.

Gautam: Well, that's an incredible list in itself. And I completely agree with you, Eunice, that we're all the product of people who've been there for us, who've supported us and been generous with their time, their mentorship, their knowledge, and who've just believed in us. And I liked what you just said a moment ago, that you might be there and you might think there's a wall, but actually there's not a wall, there's only a door. And that's a very nice way of putting it. It's very good. That in itself would be something that I'm sure our listeners will take as one of the nuggets from this podcast.

Eunice: I hope so.

Gautam: Well, they will definitely. Now, one of the things I mentioned in my introduction is that you are an arbitrator as well as being an arbitration practitioner. So what, first of all, got you interested in the field of arbitration?

Eunice: Well, that's another interesting story. So after I left the CPS, I applied to study international law and international relations at the University of Kent. Now, a couple of weeks into the term, I was informed that the international relations aspect of the course that I'd started was no longer available. There had been a mix-up of some sort in the curriculum, and I was offered international commercial law. I think about this, I'd been doing criminal practice all my life, and I had no idea, except College of Law, Belford back in the day, about international commercial law. I was not happy. But there seemed to be no other choice, so reluctantly I agreed. And one of my modules was WTO law. Shout out to Professor Donatella Alessandrini. Who was my lecturer then. And another module was international arbitration, taught by Professor Gwengo Duntun. It was he who suggested to me that I seemed to have an aptitude for the subject. So he suggested that I contact the Charter Institute of Arbitrators, become a student member, and then find out