Alumni profile

David McGuirk

I was fortunate to benefit from the foresight of an extremely wise headmaster. When our lower sixth class was boarding the coach en masse to go to visit the University of Leeds, Mr Byrne lent over my shoulder and suggested to the somewhat aimless 17 year old that I was that I might want to go and visit the Law Faculty. And that was the start of my journey. 

 I came from a maths and science background, and the last essay that I had written was on Far From the Madding Crowd (or possibly Silas Marner) in GCSE English Literature. But I felt comfortable with the idea of a law degree, and the options that it would leave open for me, particularly when I understood that it was possible to continue with my French studies as a minor. 

 I am from Manchester and had spent all my life to that point in Sale, going to school at St Bede’s in Whalley Range. And whilst most of my friends were heading to Leeds or Sheffield, this apple wanted to fall slightly further (but not too far) from the tree. Newcastle Law School presented the perfect solution – great reputation, lively city, good course structure, not too close but not too far from home. My sister dropped me and my BMX (it was the mid-nineties) at Castle Leazes on her way to her uni in Edinburgh and it went from there. 

 First year was a real mixture of getting into the studying (working out how to write that essay!), finding my feet as a young adult away from home for the first time, and establishing a group of friends to take advantage of all that the city had to offer. It’s fair to say that my studies didn’t truly excel in year one. But as I ticked into year two, nights on the rotating dance floor at The Boat gave way to more credible venues like World Headquarters, and as marks started to count towards my final grade, I began to work it out. 

 In third year, the 10 Law and French students stepped away from the rest of the Faculty and travelled for our year abroad. For me that was l’universite de Montpellier 1. I was fortunate to be paired with one of my best friends, Gemma, and a fellow Mancunian who became a friend for life, Dan, and the three of us embarked on a real adventure. 

 We all headed back to Newcastle for the final, all important fourth year, and with the help and guidance of Ashley Wilton as the Law and French mentor, and the likes of Michael Allen as the Criminal Law lecturer at the time, we all scored that all important 2:1. The celebrations in Jesmond that night were legendary. 

 From there I had a brief stop in Guildford for LPC at the College of Law (partly to see what living in the South was like). Then it was back to South Manchester for my training contract, which I did at Neil Myerson (now Myerson). That was an incredible experience for me, and I found the transition from academic to practical really meaningful and rewarding. The chance to take some of those concepts that had felt so abstract in the seminar groups at the Law School now started to have some meaning. I started to be able to visualise the issues and the solutions - a bit like how maths had always made sense to me through being able to see, or probably feel, the patterns in the numbers. 

 My training contract was predominantly litigation based and I qualified into commercial disputes at Myerson. After two more years, I received a call from a recruitment agent retained by Eversheds (as it was at that pre-merger time) who invited me to interview for a role as a real estate litigator. I joined the firm on Hallowe’en in 2005.