Commuting judge starts work in court’s FSD
Justice Nick Segal
(CNS): A judge who is commuting some 4,000 miles to his new job in the Financial Services Division of the began hearing cases recently. A new non-resident judge, Justice Nick Segal, will serve in Cayman from time to time as required. A specialist in financial, commercial and insolvency law and litigation, Segal has been immersed in the financial crises, frauds and follies of the corporate and banking world for years.
Chief Justice Anthony Smellie said effective arrangements were now in place to allow Segal to begin work in Cayman’s courts while he continued to practice as a partner of a large multi-national firm of lawyers in the UK.
“It is encouraging to know that his experience and expertise will continue to be available to support our responses to the challenging demands of the FSD in particular,” he said.
Justice Segal said it was an honour to be appointed a judge of the Grand Court given the quality of the other judges and the important and significant cases handled by the FSD
With a background in international and cross-border work around the world, Segal has acted for corporations, banks, insolvency practitioners, governments, central banks and regulatory bodies. Involved in many cases relating to financial crises in the early 1990s, he acted on behalf of the government of Abu Dhabi in the BCCI case and during the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s he was involved in the restructuring of a large telecom company in Thailand. During the Russian financial crisis in 1998 he was involved in the restructuring and bankruptcy proceedings of a major Russian bank.
In the recent financial crash he advised the Bank of England, the directors of Northern Rock and the special administrators of the UK subsidiaries of the collapsed Icelandic banks. He was also involved in the English litigation relating to the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
“Commercial transactions, disputes and litigation take place within a cultural milieu and when parties from different places come together there can be misunderstandings and culture clashes,” Justice Segal said. “Lawyers can have an important role as translators and communicators, bridging the cultural divide by explaining differences in expectations, preconceptions and concepts – although it has to be said that some lawyers seem to spend their time expanding and exploiting rather than minimising the differences.”
This close involvement with international legal systems gave him, he says, a “familiarity and a taste for cross-border international law”, and while gaining experience at the forefront of many banking crises, Segal remains interested in the academic side of the law. He has written and contributed to several textbooks and teaches insolvency law to postgraduate students at Oxford. In the past he has been a visiting fellow at both Queen Mary and Westfield College and University College London.
He obtained his degree in law from Oxford and graduated in 1979 with a first class degree and was awarded the Carl Albert Prize. He currently serves as deputy chair of the Oxford University Alumni Board and is also member of the advisory board of his college (St. Peter’s College) and of the Master’s in Law and Finance Programme.
Category: Finance, Financial Crime
