SAHM 2024: A conversation with Nity Raj of Brentford Football Club

Inclusivity Included: Powerful personal stories

Nity Raj, General Counsel and a Director of Brentford Football Club, joins Gautam Bhattacharyya to discuss South Asian Heritage Month. They delve into Nity's career influences, his role at Brentford FC (the Bees), the significance of his South Asian heritage, and the collective steps needed to advance DEI and increase South Asian participation in the highest levels of football and sports.

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Transcript:

Intro: Welcome to the Reed Smith Podcast, Inclusivity Included: Powerful Personal Stories. In each episode of this podcast, our guests will share their personal stories, passions, and challenges, past and present, all with the goal of bringing people together and learning more about others. You might be surprised by what we all have in common, inclusivity included.

Gautam: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to our special podcast series to celebrate and honor South Asian Heritage Month 2024. And I'm delighted to welcome as our guest on this episode, Nityajit Raj, Nity, who is a director and the general counsel at Brentford Football Club. Hello, Nity.

Nity: Hi Gautam.

Gautam: It's really good to see you again. And we'll obviously, we'll have a, looking forward to a great conversation with you on, I know, topics of immense mutual interest. But before I kick in with my questions, I'll introduce you to our listeners. One of the great things about this podcast is I get to speak to a former colleague of mine from Reed Smith. Nity and I worked together at Reed Smith. He was a solicitor at our firm, practicing in intellectual property and in commercial law. Disputes arising out of those issues. After leaving Reed Smith, he went to AOL, where he held a number of important roles in the legal department. Then he moved on to Smart Odds. And then after his time at Smart Odds, he joined Brentford Football Club and became a director there almost 10 years ago, and has contributed significantly in so many ways to the development of Brentford Football Club. A club very dear to my heart, I must say, because I'm a North West London boy, Nity is a West London boy, and although we were separated geographically by a few miles, Brentford is very dear to both our hearts. And the story of Brentford is in many ways one of the most inspirational stories there can be about a football club, because Brentford, when Nity joined them, was not a Premier League football club. It is now very much an established Premier League football club. And we will talk about that in the course of this podcast. So, Nity, it's just wonderful to have you with us. At Brentford, obviously, you're the General Counsel and you're also on the board. And so you've got some incredible insights. And one of the things that we will touch upon in the course of this discussion, because it is in celebration and in honor of South Asian Heritage Month, is about your role, your views on how much more South Asians can do in the world of sport and in particular football, and a number of things that really resonate with you on the issue of heritage and how important that's been to you, your career, how you look at things, how you look at the future of things. And I'm really looking forward to this conversation. So thank you again, Nity. We'll dive straight in, shall we? Nity: Great. Looking forward to it.

Gautam: Great stuff. I can tell you, I certainly am. So tell us, in terms of your career background, I touched upon that very briefly at the beginning of the podcast in introducing you. But why don't you tell us a little bit about, I think, two things I'd like to ask you about, Nity. First of all, what drove your interest in law in the first place? And secondly, in the course of your career so far, who have been your greatest mentors and inspirations?

Nity: Well, when I was at school, I had no idea what I wanted to do around the time of A-levels and then when you have to select a course for university. And um my brother's contemporaries were all in the early part of their courses and he was friends with a lot of law students then and and and so I had some people to talk to about uh about their uh their careers and so I talked to them and they that was interesting. But the reality was, the thing that most interested me was watching a program called LA Law, and very glamorous, exciting TV show, which not entirely accurate description of what it was like to work in a law firm in London. So I didn't necessarily have a, uh, the, the introduction that I got wasn't necessarily a realistic one, but, but, you know, law, it seemed to me was something which was important, um, something which meant you got involved in everything and, you know, I'm a nosy person. I'm curious. And, you know, one thing I have learned is that the lawyers always get involved, you You know, somehow we have to be around to help do anything in business and in life. And so it suited me very well. Although, as I say, my introduction to it wasn't necessarily realistic. But I think my brother's friends managed to persuade me that it was a good course to do. And, you know, it wasn't going to hurt to have a law degree under my belt. And to some extent, you kind of end up on an escalator, don't you, where you do a law degree and, you know, then you're presented with all the legal professional routes to training. So unless you get off the escalator, then, you know, you end up in a legal career. So I suppose it's also about just not getting off. I like the sound of it and I carried on.

Gautam: Well, thank goodness you did get on that escalator, Nity. And in the course of your journey on that escalator, have there been any particular people who've been really inspirational to you, who've mentored you, who you've sought to follow in their footsteps of, so to speak?

Nity: Well, I mean, from a personal perspective, the person that had the most influence on my life as a young person was my dad. My mum died when I was 10 so he was a single parent for our formative years and. He was a shift worker he'd come to this country in the in the 60s and you know his aim was to to make a better life for himself. And his family and and I and I think. He did that and he instilled in us a work ethic myself and my brother hard work academic excellence like many Asian and families was the kind of um the driver of his ambitions for us and and so yeah from a relatively early age that's you know I understood that uh you know we would have to do well and work hard and uh and that's what he wanted for us so I think that was a good starting point and his um inspiration was was a big part of that. I have an older brother he's three three and a half years older than me he was academically very very strong um you know top student and uh I was a little bit less diligent should we say but you know watching him and his uh journey meant that I was you know I had a good role model for achievement and you know he he uh quite early on had got a. Job worked hard you know university and uh and so that felt like the natural next step I didn't I wasn't successful in finding a a training contract early on lots of law students in their seconds or even their third years apply and get uh training contracts so that they can then be funded through the legal practice courses and and I didn't get that second or third year I didn't get a summer. Placement in my summer first year applied to increasing numbers and firms I had a very clear idea that I was interested in technology and and I wanted to do IP and so I applied to a lot of city firms to do that and just really struggled I didn't know quite what I was doing wrong but just didn't get this didn't get anywhere and I think part of it was simply that that was a period when it was, you know, incredibly competitive to, to get, to get seen. And so my first break was. To take a pause from the sort of usual route. I did a master's in intellectual property. And having done that, I was a paralegal, took on the job as a paralegal at Burberry, so in the rag trade, in their intellectual property department and did trademarks for them. And that was a first step into in-house before I'd even qualified. And the general counsel there was a guy called Robin Lim, an in-house solicitor in East Avon, a man of East Avon heritage who was a really brilliant in-house lawyer. And he really understood his business. And that was my first experience and understanding of how to be an in-house lawyer was from somebody who spent the time to learn what his clients were doing completely independently of the legal work. Just to understand how do you make a pair of trousers what do you what do you need what do you do to achieve the objectives of the company and he was very integrated and involved in that business again not just as a lawyer but as a as an exec and as a trusted member of the team and that was my first really good example of how to conduct myself in a business and and even before qualification just to see what it was like to work in an office to instruct lawyers I was on the other side um burberry at the time used PaySense so I had a partner on speed dial that I could ring and get to do uh infringement cases and it and I felt immediately like I owned my work and so felt some responsibility straight away because um Robin was willing to give me some of my own cases to to deal with and that was it for me I was I was hooked because I felt involved I felt part of something um I liked the company that I was working for I was really interested to talk to interesting people I went to talk to. Tailors and designers and you know about what they were doing and how they did it retail people and everything that they told me and everything they taught me was really interesting because they were interested in it so as a result I had a genuinely non-legal introduction to the world of business and and that was the best thing for me that was the best thing I needed. So Robin was certainly the first work mentor that I had. And then after that, what was then Richard's Butler, now Reed Smith, became my training contract. And through my career, I had a number of seats as a trainee, including MTV, which is another in-house stint. So I worked for Svenja Geissmar, who was the general counsel there at MTV, who is now general counsel at Arsenal. So I get to work with her again. And so it's funny how, you know, your mentors come back into your life and your career that, you know, it's a small world and the legal world is an even smaller one. And so, you know, good people meet good people. And uh and you know so that's been really really fun and and uh nice to uh to come across her again and so many other senior lawyers at Richard's Butler helped me understand how to be a better a better lawyer so there's almost too many to mention but and the probably the person that had most influence from my perspective were actually the two, um, um, intellectual property partner called David Marchese. He's a really interesting, really intelligent, really academic, really learned lawyer, you know, and everything I wrote got edited and edited and edited and, you know, red lines over everything. But he taught me how to write, taught me how to draft and I'm always incredibly grateful to him. And the other person was Michael Skrein, you know, very well, Gautam. But um Michael had a this extraordinary work ethic and you know he's always in the office late into the evening didn't turn up very early in the morning so if you're a training in this department you kind of ended up burning the candle at both ends but again somebody with this incredible experience and and so I just tried to be in sponge and learn as much as I possibly could and so you know along the way those two and many many others meant that when I was ready to fly the nest and I knew pretty soon that in-house legal was for me I wanted to be part of something it wasn't just a law firm it seemed to me that law firms were unusual businesses and the the normal commercial world was everything else and I wanted to get straight out into that and so So, yeah, I got a brilliant training. The best bit of advice Michael ever gave me was he had been to an Indian restaurant and he'd had some issue with the service and had left and gone to the Indian restaurant next door. And when he told the owner at the second place and how this guy in the second place looked after everybody and it got everything done quickly and you know they were in a rush to get to the airport or whatever and so so you know it's just amazing how you managed to get it in a way that these this other guy didn't and the restaurateur said ‘customer is customer’ and that kind of phrase really stuck with me that if you want to give good service customer is customer customer's always is right just make them happy whether it's your internal client your external client it's your in-house who who are you looking after and they become the center of your world make make them happy and life gets a lot easier so that has served me very well.

Gautam: Well, you've had some great advice over the years, Nity, I can tell you and yuu put it into motion, I can tell you. But yeah, I still have very fond memories of you at the firm. Time is always one of these things that precludes going into too much of the old days and making us too dewy-eyed about the old days. But yeah, some great mentors, David and Michael, brilliant people. And the advice customer is customer. It's ubiquitous. It's universal. Let's turn now to your association with Brentford Football Club, the Bees, as they are affectionately known, a club very dear, as I said, to you and me. I'm just very interested if you could tell us a little bit about how your association with Brentford came about, and then a little bit about your role there, because I mentioned in opening that you serve on the board, and you're also general counsel to Brentford Football Club. So tell us a little bit more about that, please.

Nity: Well, I left AOL as General Counsel for International in 2010, and I had led a project to shut down a lot of international offices at the time. So that was quite a tough thing to do. But it was a really good experience to see a business in that phase of its history. And um and it's important to do that properly and right and to see you know to do right by people, so it was really a really good thing to be involved in and although at the time it was very very hard work and especially to to tell you know what was in the end thousands of people, that you know we were shutting something down and and closing up offices all across europe but I needed a break after that, and I decided I wanted to do something completely different because I had a career at AOL, which meant that I had done everything that I'd wanted to do with my in-house career at the time, and, you know, a bigger and bigger team, an international team, done lots of traveling, you know, had a really amazing run of it. And I wanted to do something completely different. And a former colleague at AOL called Phil Wall, who was the head of UK legal for AOL, had gone off to this small sports research company called Smart Odds, which was owned by his best friend from university, Matthew Benham. And Matthew is a genius and a kind of, entrepreneur and you know just a kind of an incredible leader and um with uh with this ability to see the possible where others would imagine the impossible you know so when I joined in 2010 um joined Smart Odds he had this other company called Brentford Football Club which you know at that time just come up from league two so the fourth division of english football pool since 1947 it had mostly been in the third and fourth division and and had one brief borough into the second division 1992-93 I think it was um but yeah for for the vast majority of its modern history it was a club that had struggled financially in the lower divisions And so to imagine the possible Premier League and beyond to probably anybody else would be madness. But Matthew decided that this wasn't just possible, it was actually quite realistic, given the ideas that he had about how things could be done differently and how much difference that could make. And I thought he was mad I i thought he was potentially just a crazy rich man pouring money down the drain but it didn't take long to realize actually he was onto something and um you know to distill it down ultimately in my opinion his method is just about better decision making. Human beings are bad decision makers. And if you can reduce the bias that applies in decision making in so many different ways, human beings will make decisions, in all sorts of bad ways that are measurable and describable, you know, all these different biases is that apply you could take all of those and and work to reduce the bias that applies, um in every way then you can be better and that's what he did in his um in his gambling it's a. Dispassionate gambler he's a an incredibly successful one and then ultimately running owning and running a football club was the same you know at this at its heart the same thing of just working out how decisions were made, where the biases apply, how to reduce them, doing so, and then carrying on, good or bad, successful or unsuccessful, keeping going with the principle, because there's a lot of luck in sport. And sometimes you can do everything right or most things right and still lose. And that's part of the fun, you know, part of the pain of this industry that we work in. But it's also what makes it a bit random. So you have to trust your principles. And that's what he did. And as I said, it didn't take me long to realize actually he’s on something I believe. But I think we can do this too and so he asked me to join the board in 2014 that's when I started getting really involved in in the football club and then from then on it was almost a case of trying to turn what was started off as more like a hobby into a full-time role because it was so much fun to be in sport uh directly that uh yeah pretty soon I was like actually I just want to do this this is too much fun and there wasn't masses of legal at that time 2014 they were promoted to the championship so second division and as a result there was more legal work but still in the second division it's it's not as complex as the premier league premier league is a global product a a massive brand on tv in virtually every country in the on the planet it is you know probably the most successful sports league in in the world and as a result there's a lot of complexity to to running a business and and the legal issues that that result but not so much in the championship and as a result I was involved in stuff beyond just the football so general management and when i first started you know i've done almost everything i'd you know found there were some light bulbs out I went out to the shops bought some light bulbs and put them in because I thought well that needs doing and I could ask someone to do it yeah you know um so things need doing and you do them and um there was an incredible team of people at Brentford and they were all working too hard to achieve as much as they could with a small organization. And so rolling my sleeves up and pitching in and having a go was an opportunity for learning at a level where you could afford to make mistakes because at that level, mistakes were less public because, you know, the whole world wasn't watching in the way that these days now. Now, you know, I see kids in the street wearing Brentford shirts. I see our players on the pitch at major competitions. And, you know, I feel like a great...

Gautam: And scoring amazing penalties without even looking at the ball or the goalkeeper. No, staring at the goalkeeper. Right. Because, you know, actually, just so everyone knows why I'm mentioning this to Nity, Ivan Toney is one of the star players at Brentford. And we're recording this podcast literally on the eve of the European Championship final in Berlin on Sunday the 14th of July in which our beloved England are playing Spain and Ivan Toney scored the most incredible penalty as part of the penalty shootout and he has this technique when he does not look at the ball he just looks at the goalkeeper and he is I think I’m right with me I’m right in saying he's on this on the statistics he's the most successful. penalty taker in the premier league isn't he?

Nity: Yeah I mean I suppose there's lots of different ways you can you can measure success but um yes Ivan has an incredible penalty taking technique and and actually I think Ivan's kind of a good example to lawyers because you know he gives a performance you know having to stand up and do his thing in the way that lawyers will have to do in a meeting or in litigation or whatever you've got to stand up you've got to get it get the job done and you may not get a second chance and so that ability to show such confidence and to to do that without what appears to be without fear is is quite incredible but yeah he's a he's a good example for for everyone who has to do something where you know you don't get a second chance, you've got to stand up and be brilliant. And, and I'm sure he's going to do well on, if he's given a chance on, on Sunday, he'll, he'll do us all proud.

Gautam: Well, he's already made us proud. And I mean, I love the fact that, you know, one thing, and I'm going to turn to a couple of other questions in a second, but I just can't resist saying I love it when players from less fancied clubs do well. Because historically much of the England team has been drawn from quote the big clubs close quote and it's just lovely to see Ivan, Ollie Watkins and other players you know who aren't necessarily and you know Mark Gahee who aren't from the quote fancied clubs you know doing so well for our country so it's just and there's a story in that too Nity as you and I both know because you know we can all dissect into your course after sunday but you know but let me turn to this because the theme of this podcast is obviously to celebrate people like you you know fantastically talented people inspirational people like you who make huge impact here and internationally you know and you are of South Asian heritage. Tell me a little bit about what the importance to you personally is of your heritage and how it drives what you do and how it pushes you to try to be better and better and better.

Nity: I think, as is the experience for many kids from South Asian backgrounds. Doing well academically and working hard at school was something which was very important to my parents and I understood from an early age that I was to do my best to achieve and that was important. So I think that's the first part is that that instilled in me a sense of importance of the responsibility that I had to use the opportunity that I had been given. And so that's the first part. And then in work and in life, that sense of duty and purpose has continued. So, you know, I look at the way that my dad works, that my whole family, you know, applied themselves in life. And, you know, the idea was to do the best for yourself, for your family and your community. And so, you know, that duty, purpose and a sense of community has proved to be a very successful driver for me. So, yeah, it's absolutely part of what I've achieved because it's a kind of driving force very much from my background.

Gautam: Thanks, Nity. I mean, and that really, you know, that really resonates with me because there's, you know, there's so much in common that you and I share on that issue itself. Although, you know, time precludes me and I shouldn't take up time speaking about myself, but because I want to focus on you. And one of the things that I know you and I both share a huge passion for greater diversity, equity and inclusion. And, you know, you are a wonderful flag flier for those principles in what you do. And there's no doubt that you are, if not the most prominent, one of the most prominent people of South Asian heritage in sport in this country and certainly in football in this country. And that's a wonderful thing. I love it. And I love what you're doing and what you and the club are doing because you've got a great focus on that at board level and as a community club. But what more can we do, Nity, just looking at this in terms of How do we get more people of South Asian heritage more involved in football at a high level? One of the things which you and I both know is historically, for years and years and years, South Asian people have been incredibly underrepresented in sport, but focusing on football. How can we do more to actually change that?

Nity: I think it's changing a lot right now. I think the first thing is just to imagine that the talent spreads evenly and opportunities don't. You know, That's just the nature of things. And as I said before, Matthew's kind of guiding principle was to imagine that we're not very good at making decisions that will be biased in some ways.. Prejudice is going to affect people's decision making. If we can reduce that bias then a consequence of that is likely to be increased diversity. And it doesn't just mean diversity of background it means diversity of thought it means that having people who think differently will make an organization more successful because if you if you have everyone is going to think the same thing you know 20 people in the team and you add a 21st person and they think exactly the same as everyone else you cannot possibly imagine that you're going to come up with more creative solution and it doesn't matter whether oxford and cambridge educated and uh whatever racial cultural background that they have the same thing is going to apply and and so diversity of thought and diversity of background it seems to me as one way in which organizations can achieve more by being more of an innovative by having a different approach to to solutions and so yeah that's that's been I think a force for good for us and and that will be how other organizations improve, it won't be because they have diversity as an objective. They will want to be better and work out, how do we do that? And diversity of background, diversity of experience, diversity of ways of thinking is one way of achieving that. So where you have these anomalies like South Asians not being involved in sport or football, the question you have to ask yourself is, is that because there's some inherent lack of interest or talent or whatever? Or is it actually because people don't recognise the opportunities or may not have been given them? And either way, if we can change that, perhaps we can be better.

Gautam: Well, look, Nity, thank you very much. You've been incredibly generous in answering all the questions and in your time. One of the things that we always do, and it's very popular with our listeners in concluding our podcast, is we always like to ask our guests a few light-hearted questions. And this podcast is going to be no exception to that so if I may I’m going to ask you a few sort of quick fire questions which are totally unrelated I think to what you do but uh and I hope you'll find them as entertaining as I always do. So first of all, have you got a favorite album?

Nity: Yeah so probably if I went to my playlist and I looked at historically what gets played most then it's hard rock probably Queen so I think I can't remember which Queen album it is but Don’t Stop Me Now would would be the the track that I have played at my funeral funeral kind of sums me up I think that was that's probably the um yeah the most played album on my playlist.

Gautam: Well great choice I mean Queen's an incredible band, huge musical legacy there. Is there a particularly favorite place that you love to travel to?

Nity: Yeah. So I was lucky enough to go on a cycling tour to California with another lawyer five, seven years ago, something like that. That's probably more than that now. It could be 10 years. And so we did Route 1, which is the coast road between San Francisco and Los Angeles over eight or nine days. Wow. And the people of California were so incredibly friendly, generous and kind that almost every time we stopped our bikes, someone would help us, someone would give us food, water, whatever. And it was just the most wonderful, wonderful time. Yeah every day we had the maddest and most brilliant experiences where you know someone said oh you know you should go and go to this particular campsite on this beach or whatever and you know here's here's a bottle of wine take it with you well you know just extraordinary kindness and generosity of the people of California so it was it was yeah wonderful.

Gautam: Superb superb and then you know just the last thing I want to ask you I mean I could carry on talking to you for a long time with you but circumstances obviously ensure that I can't do that. Football is a huge part of your life is there another sport that you also particularly love apart from football? So unlike almost every South Asian person South Asian heritage in the UK i'm not that into cricket never really was so I don't know why I didn't end up getting, involved but that's that's the one that typically people would will say that they love their cricket whereas for me it was always football or nothing else really I do play a bit of badminton and I do like to run and I'm involved in my local park run and I enjoy that a lot so those those are my things and then cycling and so I will watch the tour a bit and yeah my version of cycling and the professional version is very very different but uh yeah that's That's the other love for me, I think.

Gautam: Superb. Well, look, Nity, thank you very much for doing this podcast. You are someone who's truly inspirational, made huge contributions. You continue to make great contributions in so many ways. And thank you very much for everything you do, for the importance of what you do. And I know our listeners are going to really enjoy listening to what you've said in the course of this podcast. I certainly have. And I know there are going to be lots and lots of people who will give us great feedback about it. So thank you very, very much. And on the eve, essentially, of the final, I know we'll both be wearing our England shirts for certainly by 8 p.m. on Sunday, the 14th of July. So I look forward to seeing you soon, Nity. And again, hugely grateful for you doing this podcast with me.

Nity: Thank you so much. Really greatful for the opportunity.

Outro: Inclusivity Included is a Reed Smith production. Our producers are Ali McCardell and Shannon Ryan. You can find our podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, reedsmith.com and our social media accounts.

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