Here’s the introduction to the piece..It could be the first time in nigh on 50 years that I agree with the Daily Mail!
Geraldine Proudler boasts a formidable reputation in the upper echelons of Britain’s legal profession.
A senior partner at giant London firm CMS, where she specialises in such fields as defamation and ‘crisis management’, her gilded CV namechecks former clients including Tom Cruise and Phillip Schofield and quotes legal handbooks that dub her ‘sophisticated,’ ‘tough,’ ‘effective’ and ‘shrewd’.
These qualities are nothing if not lucrative.
Paid up to £1.3million a year, her firm’s 375 partners last year shared profits of £173million (an average of nearly half a million each).
Proudler, who is reputed to charge almost £1,000 an hour, is one of the organisation’s top assets.
That in turn allows the 65-year-old solicitor and her husband, also a successful lawyer, to live in considerable grandeur in a £5million house in Chelsea, where she is regarded as a pillar of the local community.
A member of the Chelsea Society, Britain’s poshest residents’ organisation, she once lobbied the council over plans to open an organic street market opposite her home (insisting that the view from its sash windows would be ‘substantially damaged’).
Lately, she’s burnished her metropolitan credentials as chair of the Board of Governors of Middlesex University and the Guardian newspaper’s non-profit foundation.
So far, so fragrant.
Yet all good things must come to an end.
And the blue-chip lawyer’s bubble of privilege was rudely punctured this week when she found herself in need of exactly the sort of ‘reputation management’ she has for years provided so expensively to clients.
On Tuesday night, Proudler, and the way she made her millions, were thrown to the centre of the bitter public debate over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Bob Seely MP used a Parliamentary debate on sanctions to name Proudler as one of four ‘amoral’ solicitors who have grown rich by teaming up with ‘Putin’s henchmen’.
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