Patrick McCann

Patrick is Director of Learning at Linklaters lawfirm, managing a team of 150. Previously Head of Learning at three law firms, he qualified as a solicitor in 1992. Patrick co-CEOs the award-winning City Century solicitor apprenticeships.  As chair of the CLLS Training Committee, he founded the Social Welfare Solicitor Qualification Fund. Recognised as  Champion of the Year at the 2024 UK Social Mobility Awards, as a Top 20 UK Legal LinkedInfluencer and as Special Mention Recipient at the 2024 British LGBT Awards.  He was ND-diagnosed in April 2024.

Tell us about your neurodiversity and how it has shown up during your career? What have been the challenges? 

I have only recently been diagnosed with ADHD by a psychiatrist who I was seeing about anxiety. From these conversations, I think that my ADHD has come out of some deep trauma as a kid and young adult who was very different. 

I have always felt othered. I grew up as a queer kid in the 1970s living in British Army camps, I was also clever at school and a bit of an outlier. I also went to university from a comprehensive school a year early, and found it was full of very self assured posh kids and it took me a few years to realise they weren that bright but just had posh voices. But the real trauma came from when I started working as a young lawyer (in the middle of the AIDS crisis). I did a lot of pro-bono work for the Terrence Higgins Trust to help defend clients with HIV and help them get life insurance payouts or help them not be evicted. During this time I became friends with lots of the clients and lots of them died. I have only recently realised that I was massively traumatised by this. I was also let go at work shortly after this for some health reasons. I am not quite sure if the trauma creates the ADHD or the other way round, but they seem strongly interlinked. 

What has tended to happen in my life is I am hyperactive most of the time, I can't do anything by half and I am often ‘all in’, 150% especially when I am helping others. But at the same time I am very attuned to the underdog and always looking for waifs and strays. I also am often organising things and creating community. It is only recently I have realised one of the reasons I am doing this is to try to look after myself as a kid. 

Also because I am expecting to be in a conflict situation, I am vigilant for danger and very rarely relax (unless I have too because I am too exhausted). This has a couple of effects on my work. On the one hand I am very keen to perform, be seen to perform and people will give me work to do and I get it done. At the same time I sometimes find it very hard to focus on what's in front of me as I am concentrating on the 4 things that are going on in my head. 

What are your strengths and how do you use them to lead others?

I am one of the best at what I do in Law. I may not be the most intelligent but I am one of the smartest- I get things done. This all comes from my hyperactivity- I say yes to things and then I am dedicated to getting them done. I work really fast and am sufficiently charismatic to get people involved or choose projects with social value that people want to be involved in.

I can create an energy around things and create a sense of wellbeing and inclusion and bring people with me. I find I can easily move to where the energy is and focus on it. I also find it easy to think of ideas and solve problems. I also can not bear injustice or inequality or wrongness so I will create work up the strategy or solution in a couple of hours to solve them. 

I have managed to build a really really diverse team, and I have managed to recruit on approach rather than achievement for example, is this person up for it, do they have some energy, do they care, are they nice, are they willing to learn? We will look for other things as well, for example sometime I will recruit for a diversity characteristic as well. So in my team, I have a man from public school, and people who have worked their way up and we have different colours, different creeds, different religions, different sexual orientation and different genders. So I think what I aspire to for my team is a sense of togetherness and a sense of support, and that we love and are good at what we do. It took me 2-3 years to build a truly collaborative culture. At first, it used to be that someone would send an email asking for help and was met by a wall of silence. To change things, I started to volunteer and lead by example. Now everyone pitches in when someone needs a hand. 

I also use my voice on LinkedIn and in the organisation. I want to leverage my seniority, my experience and my position to demonstrate what rightness and wrongness looks like. And some of this is now quoted back at me which is nice. And I am now speaking up in the organisation. Recently there was an internal  meeting and rather than agreeing with a flawed proposal, I was the one who spoke up and said this might be a bad idea and how can we make it better. This was then welcomed as the project team needed this candour.

But there are downsides, my suspicion of others has meant it is hard for me to make friends with many partners and has meant I have often had to move organisations rather than within organisations to get promoted. I also say things I shouldn't say and am always cracking jokes. For example, a partner asked me how we should deal with diversity and inclusion and I spontaneously said we should get rid of the Partners dining room as it is exclusive- probably not the response they were looking for. It also means that, in meetings, I am the person saying things that others in the room dare not say (afterwards they say thank you for saying that) but it means I am putting my head above the parapet.

Coming from a less privileged background, I am uncomfortable with privilege. Of course, this means I am arguably in the wrong sector (given the prevalent socio-economic profile of its people as there is loads of privilege here and I am constantly agitated by this difference. But I mask all of this with humour and confidence (boarding on arrogance) and excitement and inclusion and over complimenting my team and building a network of friends I can trust. 

What changes would you like to see to help people who are neurodiverse excel? 

Leaders in law firms - my first thought is that more of us are A-typical than is assumed. Law firm leaders tend to be focused, driven, workaholic, able to bring a team around them (or not), very expert (or not).  To succeed as a leader in a law firm,you are probably demonstrating some of the aspects of neurodiversity. I would like more of us to talk to someone about this. For me it has really helped me understand why I am what I am and to understand what can be done to make my life more tolerable. 

The younger generation are finding out about this, but I would love it if more of us as senior leaders could talk about it or just talk about how hard this job is. Why can we not talk about how effortful leadership is rather than how effortless we try to make it look and the cost of it to a person? And, for an organisation, if you can find someone who is hyperfocused, who works and works and who is a thought leader, then of course you are going to leverage it, but perhaps organisations can also think about how to support such colleagues. 

Inspire us: Please can you share some inspiration- favourite leadership book, story of someone who has inspired you …. 

The most inspirational leader I know Justin D'Agostino who is CEO of Herbert Smith Freehills, another big law firm. I don’t know if he is neurodiverse but I do know that he is very expressive, truthful and really positive and also honest and unashamed of who he is. He is the one gay managing partner of the law firm. He is a real inspiration of how you can be yourself and how you can massively succeed and inspire people. 

Another inspiration of mine was a former HR Director Chris Lynch -  she has a real quietness and calmness about her that was the Ying to my Yang and also really authentic.

So a great book is Networking by Devora Zach which is for introverts. Now I am not an introvert - so this book wasn’t written for me - but I found it inspirational. She is so comfortable in herself and writes so humorously and doesn't take herself too seriously. I find that this is intoxicating. She is so deliciously herself. And I like to think that this is something that I try to do. I like to tell people they are fantastic.