Sheila Ahuja KC – A&O Shearman, Singapore

Sheila Ahuja KC would have preferred not to have been the sole solicitor-advocate appointed to KC in 2015 (alongside 104 barristers) as it meant that she had no-one she could “just call to ask how do you plan to navigate this or that aspect of being a brand-new silk.” Sheila is an arbitration specialist based in Singapore, although she works out of Hong Kong (her place of birth and where she has since been appointed Deputy Judge in the High Court) a fair amount of the time.  Her cases cover the whole Asia-Pacific region, with a particular focus on India.  Sheila co-leads the Asian arbitration practice of A&O Shearman and is joint-chair of the firm’s India Group.  Sheila advises clients on complex international commercial arbitrations and investor-State disputes.  She has particular expertise in disputes involving joint ventures, distributorship arrangements, complex financial products, and energy and infrastructure projects. Besides arbitral bodies, Sheila regularly appears as lead counsel before the senior courts, including in London – experience that was vital in her success in the competition for King’s Counsel.

Sheila describes herself as “Hong Kong, born and bred”. She is ethnically Indian, her parents having met and married in Hong Kong after moving there from India.  Sheila spent her formative years in local Hong Kong schooling (one of a handful of non-ethnic-Chinese pupils in her class) learning to speak Cantonese Chinese as fluently as her parents’ two Indian dialects.  She later acquired fluency in English and Mandarin Chinese (and learned French for eight years but never really kept it up sufficiently to claim anything like fluency, she says).   She has always been as comfortable in one of her formatively-learned languages as any other of them.  This linguistic skill was in her blood, as was an allied connection with the legal system.

Sheila’s late father had a particular ability for learning new languages.  He came to HK as a tradesman on a ship having ended up speaking about eleven dialects of both India and Pakistan, post-partition.  This was very helpful in the Hong Kong courts where he secured employment as a court interpreter (until 2017).  Sheila’s mother studied law for ten years and became a barrister in her late 50s, Sheila’s first sister is a lawyer, and her second sister is now studying law – in her 40s.   And yet, this deep engagement with the law really “came from nowhere”, observes Sheila, the family having no generational family or close friend connections with the legal system until she and her sister decided to do law.   Sheila is extremely grateful to her parents for their support and for the multi-cultural milieu and education which they provided for her, setting her up so well for a career in International Arbitration.

The origins of her legal career can also be traced to Sheila’s passion for social or informal opportunities for debate (“I like the sound of myself, you know!”) both at home and at school (“I was a debater in my school”).  And that advocacy ability was developed in both Cantonese and English.  Sheila’s passion for drama studies also played a part in her future career, a further ‘ingredient’ being her great love for problem-solving.  Thanks again to her parent’s outlook, her gender was not allowed to inhibit her attending university (at a time it did for other girls and women in HK), thus enabling her career choice.

Sheila’s parents, however, were not affluent and Sheila had to work in various jobs before being able to afford to attend university.  She worked as a para-legal at a law firm; for CNN as a contract manager; and as a clerk at an eminent HK set of chambers. “All my choices were just automatically in the direction of law. I just needed to kind of actually bridge that gap of how I get there and study.”  She took her first degree from the University of London (UoL) as an external student, graduating with upper second-class honours in the third year of a normally four-year course, and winning a prize for the top marks in the second year; a rare achievement all round.

Sheila had originally applied to Cambridge University “as a long shot” and had been invited to interview and even offered a place to study there.  However, at that time, she did not know how to go about seeking the necessary funding and turned the place down.  But after getting her 2i from UoL, Sheila applied to Cambridge again. This time, she says she went about gaining funding in the right way, including a part scholarship and also some funding from her then boyfriend (who is now her husband!). Whilst this BA in Law course covered some of the same ground as her UoL degree, it covered enough new ground as to be more than worthwhile.  In addition, this Cambridge degree automatically converted into an MA.

After graduating from Cambridge, Shiela began a training contract with Allen and Overy (as it then was). Being back in HK, Sheila realised that she needed to learn some Mandarin, as that had become an essential requirement of any training contract.  She therefore took a course in the language in Beijing to ensure that she “could say that I had some level of proficiency”. On taking the training contract with Allen & Overy, Sheila did have some options in London but felt quite strongly that Asia was her home and where she wanted to build her career and family life and of course be near to her parents.

While working with Allen & Overy, Sheila did a good deal of court litigation work and realised that “litigation was still my thing“.  Furthermore, she knew for sure that arbitration was a specialist practise which could bring together her different cultural affinities, not just Indian and Chinese, but also English.  “I didn’t want to let go of any of it. I sort of wanted to have my cake and eat it two to three times!”.  In her chosen work, her combination of advocacy/ arbitration skills with her mix of cultural affinities has been of considerable advantage in the market both with clients, in proceedings, with witness interviews and with the tribunal itself. “It can have a strong impact whilst not compromising any legal principles.”

So how did Sheila get to the point where she thought about applying for King’s Counsel?  She says that it was “a bit of a process in the sense that I worked very closely with Iain Milligan KC” (then head of) 20 Essex Street, in London for a period.  And in their spare time, they spoke a great deal about the differences between working as an advocate in a major law firm as compared to the career of an advocate in chambers. Sheila wanted the best of both of those gilded worlds.

Another key factor impacting her thinking about aspiring to KC was those in silk who had preceded Sheila in the firm.  These great advocates, such as David Lee KC (later Judge Lee), David Mackie KC, Judith Gill KC, Matt Gearing KC (who was Sheila’s “close supervisor and mentor”) and Mark Levy KC, who was still at the firm in the London office.  Sheila had the privilege of working with them, frequently as second chair.

Another spur to applying for silk was a string “of quite complex, very, very different types of cases…involving different degrees of intensity in either process or substance, most of them in either English law or English seated law.”  One of these cases was in Dubai, several in HK and Singapore but most of them in London.  In those later cases, Sheila sat a great deal with Matt Gearing KC and Harry Salve KC of Blackstone Chambers (also of ethnic Indian origin and a renowned Senior Advocate in India and an English silk).  Sheila felt comfortable talking to all these inspirational people about her possible suitability for King’s Counsel.  They persuaded Sheila that her skill set made her an ideal applicant for silk.

Sheila was impressed by the quantity and quality of the guidance on the KC application process available from King’s Counsel Appointments on the website and, if required, by phone.  She found this both helpful and very interesting, for example in relation to diversity. Sheila also said that she read the previous KC Profiles and found these very helpful and encouraging.   They revealed the very wide variety of backgrounds of previously successful applicants for silk.

Sheila has a very good friend who gave her a notebook with the letters QC (as KC was then) written on the front, for Sheila to jot down her thoughts, which would assist her many years later when it came to applying for silk.  That friend is now a “very senior lawyer at a very major organisation”.  Sheila referred to that book when she was preparing her KC application.

Whatever the eventual outcome of her application was to be, Sheila found the  process of collating your own credentials to be very useful; making an objective assessment of yourself against some prescriptive criteria.  It was, though, extremely demanding and she had to “let go of lots of stuff” during the application year.  Her husband and family’s support was absolutely crucial.   Sheila would strongly recommend any future applicants to “lock some time in your diary every week” to deal with the application form, to think about what you had done in your cases and how that fitted against the requirements for the competencies.  “Making the time is so critical because it’s very easy to not remember everything about yourself for when you’re filling out the form, because that time does go by quickly and the deadline is a hard one…” says Sheila. So much of what senior advocates do becomes routine, and cases come and go, making it all the more important to turn your mind to those cases again and what you achieved, perhaps in somewhat obscure corners – but ones pertinent to the KC competencies.

The actual interview was as daunting as she thought it would be but topics and cases that she had thoroughly refamiliarised herself with came up.   Preperation was absolutely key to the confidence Sheila needed to do her very best at the interview. She thought of it as like a cross between a previous interview, for partner, and a law school exam.  You had to keep in front of mind the legal substance of your cases and the rigour which they required, and how your assessors might describe them. It was important for Sheila to be confident that she could communicate and articulate the aspects of the cases in the tight time frame of the interview.   In preparation, it all went back to the key question: “how does this fit in with and illustrate my excellence in an aspect of the competencies?”  Sheila added that, “I must say that as I got closer to it [the interview], I felt, and I also do this for exams, that I needed to also step away from it a little bit, because it’s not about sounding rehearsed…It isn’t a regurgitating exam paper.”  You also had to step away from the preparation and relax a bit, says Sheila.  “And as lawyers, we find that really hard, like for hearings. We prep until the night before, so it’s very hard to say I’m going to stop now. I’m going to take walks.”  So, before her interview, Sheila took herself off for a lovely walk about St. James’s Park to relax herself. Self-care was important too, a good night’s sleep and a good meal the night before the interview.

Sheila experienced a real sense of positive adrenaline before the interview, “in a way that I was going into a hearing before a very High Court or a very senior tribunal or something which for my client was extremely important”.   Sheila calmed herself just before the interview to ensure that her positive adrenaline and ‘good nerves’ did not “come across as too much nervousness”.  But she “sat down and got into a little bit of rhythm [at the interview] and I felt happier. And then I knew I could get through it in a way that was a conversation” albeit a very challenging one.   She came out of the interview feeling “that was fair”.

When it was all over and the only thing to do was wait (from October to January) for the result, Sheila said her abiding feeling was that she felt “empowered because I went through that process and I felt like I came out as somebody who’d been through something that was meaningful. And ; ”Wow, that was a moment in my career.  Whatever the outcome.”

Having an international arbitration career that entailed extensive foreign travel was not challenging until her family came along, but it is still vary doable thanks to the amazing support from her husband, daughters and extended family.  But, she says, “You know, you do have to be where you have to be…”:  There was no substitute for ‘being there’.  She needed the clients to be confident that she was thoroughly at home in not just the particular seat of law but with the actual cultural milieu and people, whether in Singapore, Hong Kong, London or Dubai, that she would be there, on the ground, seeing the case through.  So, being in silk will mean ‘more of the same’ for Sheila.

As to advice to those contemplating applying for KC, Sheila said it was important to “to work out the pieces of yourself, who you are, and how that comes together as an offering so that you can describe your journey even as you’re on it”.