Lack of language skills or familiarity with his adopted home proved no barrier to young lawyer Daragh Brehony when he headed to Madrid to further his career in arbitration over a decade ago.
Brehony recalls he had never even been to Spain when he landed there to work in 2014. The Rathfarnham man did, however, have legal qualifications from UCD, King’s Inns and a masters from NYU alongside a burning ambition to pursue an international career in law.
“When I finished my masters in New York, a professor I had worked with there told me about an opportunity to work with a well-known arbitrator in Madrid that was looking for a native English speaker. I didn’t speak Spanish but I was hungry and ambitious to get into arbitration, so I came here with the mindset that I’ll give it three or four years and take it from there. That was over 10 years ago.”
Brehony admits that his first year there was tough, however.
“Even though Madrid is a dynamic international city, it’s not like moving to Berlin, for example, where you can expect that everyone is going to speak English. So there was a part of me that was naive and hadn’t really thought of all the challenges I was going to face from the cultural and language barriers.”
Gradually, however, Brehony eased himself into work and life in a city that he has no intention of leaving in the near future. He is now on the hunt for an apartment to buy having rented since he arrived.
The welcoming nature of the Spanish has made a huge difference in his decision to settle here.
“Spanish people are very good at helping you to integrate. I know people here who have gone to work in Dublin in tech firms and who tell me, ‘Irish people are nice but it’s very hard to integrate into their social group’. I have found that to be the opposite in Spain. I found it easy to integrate into Spanish social groups even from very early on. Spanish people are incredibly warm and open.”
Switched
Brehony switched to his current law firm in 2019. Pérez-Llorca, headquartered in the Spanish capital, employs around 500 lawyers and has an international reach. Most of Brehony’s work is in international arbitration, representing companies in areas such as construction, engineering and mining among others, as well as in shareholder disputes.
A typical case, he explains, would be between a contractor and owner of a project who get into a dispute where an owner might assert that a contractor has performed their work with defects or where there are significant and costly delays. There will be technical experts involved, assessing whether there are defects, or in the case of a delay, who was at fault.
There is a well-established international arbitration infrastructure in place with institutions such as the International Chamber for Commerce based in Paris, the London Court of International Arbitration, the American Arbitration Association in New York and the International Court for Dispute Resolution, all offering rules-based arbitration that you can select and opt into in your contract.
“The advantages are flexibility to shape the procedure for the dispute and it also provides confidentiality. It’s good for international disputes.
“If the contractor is French, for example, and a client is Irish, and if you go to the courts in either jurisdiction, neither party is going to be entirely happy. International arbitration allows parties to find a more neutral ground for solving their dispute.”
Brehony, who lives a 25-minute walk from the office in the centre of Madrid, enjoys the environment where he lives. “It has a great outdoor life, possibly because so many people live in apartments. There are park benches everywhere and the plazas are filled. It’s a very safe, friendly and social environment.”
Work culture
As for the work culture, negative stereotypes of Spanish work practices and a mañana attitude to deadlines are just the stuff of myth, he says.
“Spanish people are incredibly hard working and do put in long work hours as well. They just tend to do things later. Work starts later and lunches are long but then people finish later in the evening. Everything is put back a few hours.”
While he has perfected his Spanish language skills in the decade that he has lived in the capital, and is able to converse fluently in both professional and social circles, the Spanish, for their part, still find it hard to pronounce his name.
“Daragh is common and known at home, but in Spain it always causes confusion. Spanish speakers pronounce every letter, so the silent gh really throws them. Every new introduction turns into a mini-phonetics lesson, with me repeating my name four or five times. In the end, most people just settle on `Darag’ with a hard g, and I’ve learnt to roll with it. After 10 years, it’s just part of the routine of living abroad with an Irish name.”
