Rose Harvey had no idea of her destination when she took up running after moving to London for law school in 2015. Now she’s gearing up to run the marathon for Team GB on 11 August.
“By the time I got to London, I was very unfit and didn’t know that many people in London either,” the lawyer-turned-professional athlete tells The Lawyer. “So I thought: ‘Okay, I need to find some friends outside my law course and get fit.’ I joined a running club and that was kind of how my love for running started.”
Harvey joined Pinsent Masons as a trainee in September 2015, qualifying into the banking team two years later. “Once I passed my training contract, from there until 2020 it was a pretty full-on career as I’m sure a lot of lawyers are aware,” she says. “I was on corporate finance and transactional deals, so quite a few late nights in the office but I was still very much into running. It was just what I loved doing at the weekends.”
A year after qualifying at Pinsents, Harvey moved in-house, working at specialist sports, music and entertainment capital and solutions company 23 Capital. Another drive to keep running was the commute – as Harvey jokes: “Anyone living in London can relate to that: getting on the Tube is not an enjoyable experience. I used to run with my backpack to the office, and roped a few colleagues into some lunch runs.”
But as her legal career picked up speed in 2020, the world around her ground to a halt, and Harvey was made redundant during the pandemic.
“I went from working like a 100 miles an hour job and every day in the office to having just three months where I was like: ‘I need a really good lockdown project to keep me sane’. Me and my fiancé signed up for a half Iron Man, and I thought: ‘Okay, I’m going to train like a pro triathlete.’ And then pools closed, the race was cancelled, and I just found myself left with running. So I kept running.”
In September 2020 Harvey went back to Pinsent Masons to work through its freelance arm, Vario, before moving to RW Blears in 2021. She says her new firm “was super-supportive of my training, and I managed to fit it round working full-time for another year and a half, and represented England in that time. Then it was 2022 and I was then signed by Puma, went pro and stepped away from the law.”
Reflecting on her transition from the law to being a professional athlete, Harvey says: “It’s very different and it felt very daunting, to be honest. It was kind of bittersweet because I really enjoyed my career and I worked really hard to get there. Running wasn’t something that I dreamed of doing since I was a kid – it was very much something I found quite late and wasn’t where I saw myself ending up. I saw myself ending up as a lawyer.”
Despite the challenges of entering professional athletics with no prior experience, Harvey has found that her legal experience has still proved valuable. “It’s definitely been a very big but fun learning curve, but at the same time my legal career has massively helped. Not just negotiating my contract, but I also do find I take a lot from the softer skills you learn through working in law: having to do deals under pressure isn’t too dissimilar from having to make a race or stand on a big start line.”
She adds: “Whatever happens, I’m still doing my absolute passion. I’m still doing my hobby – the thing I used to just do at the weekends – how lucky am I now to be able to do that and make a career of it.”
Dressage has come under fire since British star athlete Charlotte Dujardin was suspended by the sport’s governing body after a video emerged of her excessively beating her horse. However, Singapore’s top equestrian athlete -Freshfields antitrust and competition senior associate Caroline Chew – hopes to show the best of the sport at the Paris Games.
Chew has spent the past months training to represent her country in her second Olympics.
“I started horse riding in Singapore as a weekly activity because my parents were really keen that we spend time outdoors,” she says. “Singapore is a city state and there are not that many outlets to do that, so we just started horse riding once a week as a family activity.”
Chew started competing casually in Singaporean and Malaysian competitions from around age 10, but her competitive career really took off when she moved to the UK to study law at the University of Bristol. From then on, she says: “I started this big juggling act”.
After graduating in 2015, Chew joined Freshfields as a trainee in 2017. “I didn’t start my career thinking that it would work out that well.” she says: “It was my first job, so it was learning how to be a professional employee as well as a lawyer, and therefore I only competed on weekends at that point and it was very much a see how it goes and see whether this is feasible. From there, I actually managed to keep at an okay level of competitions. During my training contract we went to the World Equestrian Games in 2018.”
Chew was the first Singaporean dressage rider at those Games, where she ranked 56th. She further qualified for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic games, where she was the first Singaporean dressage competitor.
Her qualification for the Olympics coincided with her qualification into Freshfields’ competition team, where she “really started building the long-term mentorships and understanding with the team, which enabled me to train a little bit more and try and make it happen.”
Chew has specialised in big tech investigations, and now practises largely in merger control. Key cases include working on the $20bn proposed merger between Adobe and Figma, which was halted in December 2023 after pressure from European regulators.
“It’s a really nice area to be in. It’s always busy and I’ve had really good colleagues,” she says. “We’ve all worked up to this arrangement: it’s not like it happened overnight. In 2019 even doing one day of remote working a week on a consistent basis was a bit of a negotiation. Post-Covid, that’s changed quite a week, so I have a negotiated one week in the office, one week remote, and in my remote week I’m still working full time, but I also train every day from 7am to 10.30am.”
Drawing comparisons between her sport and her legal practice, she says: “With your career, it’s not just the technical challenge of it, it’s also the consistency… If you’re working on a really busy merger for a West Coast client, the reality is that a lot of your meetings are going to happen very late and you’re going to be working until the early hours of the morning. Especially as I’ve gotten more senior, I’ve been incredibly conscious that because my mornings are taken up by horse riding, I’m not the hold up on any work streams, which means that I’ll either stay up late or get up early to get things moving again.”
Chew will be taking the younger of her two horses, Mo, to the games this year, and is excited for her first post-COVID games to see friends and family on the sidelines when she competes at Versailles next week.
As for Harvey, she will run on 11 August, and we wish her all the best for her wedding just three weeks later. Harvey sums it up: “From one exciting event to the next, it’s going to be a very big August.”
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