Welcome to Settled Up, the Payment Expert podcast series where we get to know the people behind the profession.
This week, we speak to Charlotte Kessler, Associate in the Commercial Disputes and Class Actions team at Edwin Coe, and David Greene, Edwin Coe’s Senior Partner, on the music, films, books, sport and comedy that shape them.
Read the full interview with Charlotte Kessler and David Greene, Edwin Coe, below.
What song do you put on before a big day, and what does it do for you?
CK: I found a new artist recently called Nectar Woode, who makes very upbeat, happy music. Her song “Good Vibrations” is a really good morning song to lift the mood.
DG: I’m a big West African music fan, so anything out of Mali or Senegal, particularly Francophone West Africa. Youssou N’Dour, Salif Keita and Angélique Kidjo are all very well-known stars from West Africa. “Summertime” by Angélique Kidjo – I can hear it in my ears now. It’s just wonderful.
What album can you play start to finish, no skips?
DG: West African music is the birth of the blues, so I love the blues and I love jazz, trad or modern. I particularly like jazz from about the 1950s to the mid-1960s. I love going to jazz clubs, the seedier the better! When I was a kid, you’d go to a club and it would be full of smoke. You could hardly see anything, and you didn’t need to smoke a cigarette yourself. They’re all very clean now, now I’m older and a lawyer at Edwin Coe.
What’s the film or box set you’ll happily rewatch forever?
CK: I really love a good legal drama. I used to watch The Good Wife. In terms of films from the last year, I really loved Conclave. It’s so picturesque – every single still from that film could hang in a museum.
DG: I recently saw a documentary about what’s happening in Gaza, NAZA, with interviews with Israeli security officers. You sit there afterwards and can’t move for some time because it is so powerful. That’s the one that has marked my last few weeks. As for legal dramas, we sort of wish our working reality was like that, but it ain’t.
CK: The closest I’ve seen to what working as a lawyer is really like is a show on Netflix called Fisk. It’s about a very small, quirky Australian law firm with only about three people in it, and the day-to-day communication between colleagues is quite accurate.
DG: It does show the mundane nature of office life and dealing with people.
CK: They have some very funny, eccentric clients, which is probably the fun part of our job, and it’s also the reality.
What’s the book you press on everyone you meet?
DG: At the end of their careers, lawyers can want to write about themselves. I say this with all respect to lawyers, but writing about old cases that are long forgotten is not the most interesting read. I could talk about lots of cases from the 80s, 90s and 2000s, but they’re old and rather forgotten. I was President of the Law Society, so I read quite a lot about the practice of law, but they’re pretty boring old law books.
At the moment I’m reading a book about the relationship between David Lloyd George and Churchill. It has recently been turned into a play by Lloyd George’s great-grandson. They came from two different sides of political life, and it covers the history from the 1900s to the 1950s.
CK: I’d go for a play. I recently watched Prima Facie with Jodie Comer, which was just brilliant, and there’s a second play by the same playwright. It brings out the morality lawyers sometimes face, and how to balance the job with your own beliefs.
There is a recording of it, which I highly recommend. It’s extremely high energy with no interval. It’s crime, so it’s a bit different to what we do, but the energy reflects the legal profession. When you’re in the middle of a case, you have to keep it up, and you’re running on adrenaline.
DG: Both plays are about the relationship between the job and private life. You act for people, and then you might have the same problems as those people, and suddenly you are also a victim of the same thing. I know something of criminal practice, and both are accurate on that issue. It’s a really difficult issue for lawyers in particular types of practice.
A film adaptation of Prima Facie starring Cynthia Erivo opens in UK cinemas on 13 November.
What’s the sporting moment you still go back and rewatch?
DG: I’m a big Arsenal fan. I’ve been a season ticket holder for very many years, and I first saw them in 1968, when even I was young.
What’s the funniest thing you’ve ever seen – a sketch, a clip, a stand-up routine?
CK: As lawyers at Edwin Coe, we like anything with a play on words. Puns.
DG: Our job at Edwin Coe is actually quite fun. There are a lot of light moments in it and a lot of camaraderie. You build up teams when you’re running a class action. I don’t want to take it too lightly, because we do an important job, but it’s one we enjoy, and having fun in the job is absolutely vital. The day job at Edwin Coe keeps us entertained, during the day at least.
We’ll be talking to Charlotte Kessler and David Greene, Edwin Coe, on the next Payment Expert podcast – where we’ll ask what has happened to customers caught up in the Guavapay collapse, why payment apps feel like bank accounts when legally they may not be, how safeguarding differs from FSCS protection, and what anyone with a few thousand pounds in an app should check this week. Catch the full conversation with Edwin Coe then.
Before the Edwin Coe episode, you can catch up on our latest episode too, where we spoke to Sulabh Agarwal, Accenture, on why stablecoin cross-border payments can cost as much as Swift and why agentic payments still need a rule book to settle liability.
