Kerri McGuigan, a senior associate in the business crime and investigations department at Peters & Peters in the city, was recently re-elected as co-chair of LILA, having held the post for just over a year now.

Previously the association’s treasurer during 2022 and 2023, she is now a long-standing committee member of a very active and energetic association. 

Ms McGuigan began her legal career in Ireland and shared ties are still strong among her fellow expatriates. LILA describes itself as a professional organisation for lawyers based in London with an affinity to the island.

The association, it says, is “built on this affinity within an apolitical and non-denominational context” and its members include lawyers, students and academics.

Now a senior associate in what the firm believes is the largest specialist white collar crime department in Europe, Ms McGuigan handles cases that range from serious fraud prosecutions to anti-money laundering and sanctions compliance. 

Peters & Peters has been involved in acting for designated individuals who have been sanctioned since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, querying and potentially challenging the sanctions that have been imposed on them.

The team generally acts for high net-worth, or ultra-high-net-worth individuals and executives in the full range of white-collar cases.

Ms McGuigan recalls that the first case that she worked on after qualifying in England concerned Barclays’ capital raising, which averted its need for taxpayer aid during the 2008 global financial crisis — and for which the bank was eventually fined £40 million last year.

On that occasion, she acted for Richard Boath, a defendant in the Serious Fraud Office’s prosecution against former Barclays executives, in which he was unanimously acquitted by a jury at the Central Criminal Court.

“I’ve done various other investigations involving the City of London Police, the NCA [the UK’s National Crime Agency] and the CFTC [Commodities Futures Trading Commission] and the United States Department of Justice,” she says.

In addition to her LLB from Trinity College Dublin and LLM from UCL, Ms McGuigan is also qualified as an attorney at law in both California and New York. 

She agrees that the desire to qualify in other jurisdictions illustrates the fact that “Irish people are quite outward looking and very aware of what’s going on elsewhere”.

“I think we understand that kind of ‘soft power’ and it’s interesting to deal with other jurisdictions, understanding how all the pieces of the law fit together and how something that happens in the UK might affect proceedings overseas,” she adds.

Growing up in Clones, Co Monaghan in what she describes as “a not particularly economically blessed area”, her legal speciality was not perhaps the profession she initially considered. 

After secondary school at Largy College in the town, she was admitted to Trinity via an access programme and appreciates the social mobility that is afforded by Ireland in its education system. 

And while the work she does is contentious — “I was always an argumentative child” — she says that doesn’t mean it has to be approached with a contentious attitude. “It’s not a fight for the sake of a fight,” she smiles. 

On arriving in London in 2015, Ms McGuigan initially planned to spend just five years in the city before returning to Ireland, but “grew to really love it here — and it has the benefit of being close to home while the quality of work that you have access to is so high”.

“Plus, there are so many Irish people here that you can enjoy a great community feeling, with all the advantages that London gives you while without losing much of that ‘being back home’ feeling,” she explains.

“I also like to go to the theatre, and I have a WhatsApp group to organise that, which was created after a group of us attended a wedding in Ireland.

“I also enjoy eating out in restaurants and going to bars — and if you’re going to be anywhere to appreciate these things, London ticks the boxes.”

There are now more than 1,000 people on LILA’s mailing list and the association has some 1,500 followers on LinkedIn. “We’re also a free membership organisation, and very focused on the London/Irish link,” she says. 

LILA convenes educational seminars as well as social networking events such as a Christmas party, its St Patrick’s Day dinner and a summer party.

“For example, we ran events on the development of human rights in Northern Ireland and some recently on the position of women in the legal industry,” she says.

“We also have what could be described as a pastoral strand, with a mentoring scheme that pairs younger members of the profession — or those who are just starting out — with more experienced lawyers.”  

While membership is free, Ms McGuigan adds that LILA must often charge entry fees to its events. “However, we try to add a little bit on so that we can make a donation to an Irish charity in London or the UK.”  

Its recent St Patrick’s dinner raised £7,500 for icap, the only specialist British-based counselling and psychotherapy service supporting people from the Irish community.

She’s secure in her belief of the necessity of a criminal defence lawyer’s role: “As a firm, we were named in Parliament just after the Russian invasion of Ukraine as acting for designated individuals, and that was quoted as though it were a bad thing.

“However, we’re defending rights. The fact that we act for high-net-worth individuals from wherever may be currently politically unpopular doesn’t mean that they are not entitled to a defence and a number of the firm’s clients have been taken off the sanctions list.”

“That means we are often at the sort of cutting edge of disputes work and I get to work with some of the cleverest, nicest people I’ve ever met,” she adds. 

Her main motivation is, she adds, is simply to do the job — not to aspire to be an administrator or manager. This is something she has in common with Michael O’Kane, senior partner at Peters & Peters (and another Irish expat), who has been listed in Who’s Who as one the world’s leading investigative lawyers.

“He told me recently that he was at a meeting with other senior partners in similarly sized firms and that he was the only one who was still actually involved in client work,” Ms McGuigan says.

“And I think everyone at the firm is interested in that: doing the work for the clients and being interested in the law — not just in the trappings of being a lawyer.”