Career Profile

I have been working at Griffins for the past three years. After completing my secondary education I read law at university.  Having completed my degree in Law, I went to study for a Postgraduate diploma in Legal Practice (LPC), to enable me to train as a solicitor.

I started out working for a law firm in outer London before jumping ship and joined The Insolvency Service in 2003. Whilst at the Insolvency Service, I completed a course in Personal Insolvency Practice. I joined Griffins as an Insolvency Administrator on the Personal Insolvency Team since that was my specialisation at The Insolvency Service. The following year, I passed the Certificate of Proficiency in Insolvency (CPI) exams fully funded by Griffins.  

After just under a year in the team, I moved into the firm’s specialist Investigations unit.  This unit is almost unique in insolvency as it contains only a few senior insolvency staff with a track record in investigation. The others include; a former DTI and SFO investigator as well as an ex-police officer.  This team deals with any form of corporate or personal insolvency that has a heavy litigation or investigative content.  Most of the cases take many years to come to fruition but often lead to high profile cases and significant recoveries for creditors. 

One unique feature of this team is that it is interlocked with the other teams as far as investigations are concerned. The team provides investigation strategy advice to personal and corporate insolvency colleagues. This means that the knowledge is shared across the office and at the same time keeping the boundaries of the teams extremely fluid.

Initially, my role within the Team was to assist the investigators in their work, giving them support whilst at the same time learning from them.  This gave me some flexibility in my learning, whilst at the same time giving me a small portfolio of personal insolvency investigations. After my initial three months in the Investigations Team, I started handling my own mixed insolvency cases, including some very high profiles cases.

I started working on some of our cross - border work in foreign jurisdictions including the USA, Europe, Afghanistan and the UAE.  This included working on MTIC ‘Carousel VAT Fraud’ cases. This proved to be steep learning curve as these cases involve high net value fraud with cross border trade. In addition to the primary role of undertaking investigations, I also attended meetings, negotiations, and Court sessions. At the same time I was regularly assisting colleagues on their cases when required.

Do I ever have a typical day? Well…….no! Information flows can be rapid and things can move very quickly and action can be immediate. On one occasion, I was in Spain for just 5 hours!

This wide range of work has allowed me to expand my technical knowledge as well as giving me a good practical grounding for my learning with the CPI.

After spending just under two years in the investigations team, the skills I had acquired stood me in good stead when I applied for promotion to management level. This application was successful and I now manage one of the teams at Griffins and have started studying (fully funded) for the Joint Insolvency Board Exams (JIEB).