At the Bar - Talks to Chris Hewer

Aleka Mandaraka-Sheppard, Director of the London Shipping Law Centre, talks to Chris Hewer

EVEN if you didn't know what she looked like, Aleka Mandaraka-Sheppard is not difficult to find in the bright and open surroundings of Caravaggio's in London's Leadenhall Street. She is the only woman in the place, and remains so for the entire period of our lunch there.

We meet at the bar, where we share a glass of wine and smoke cigarettes without let or hindrance - an increasingly rare luxury in these politically misguided times. We each order a risotto, very good and very expensive. The chef is apparently Welsh, which seems incongruous but nevertheless works.

Aleka was born on the shipowner's island of Andros. She was inspired by the sea, and has in turn inspired countless others during her time as director of the London Shipping Law Centre. She loved her life on Andros, but her ambition to write and to study law took her from the Embiricion school on Andros to Athens University. She qualified as a lawyer in Greece in 1974, but it was not long before she was off on her travels again, this time to London. She had a desire to study shipping law, and managed to secure a Chandris scholarship, which paid for her studies in London.

Aleka studied shipping law in London under professors Cadwallader and Hardy-Ivamy, which is the equivalent of having David Beckham teach you how to take free kicks. Having got her LLM, Aleka secured another scholarship, this time from Interocean, and took a PhD in psychology. To this day, she is a great people-studier.

In time, Aleka came to regard London as her city. She still lives in London, in Chiswick, although she always finds time each year to return to Andros. One day, she knows, she will return to Andros to live. "It's what we Greeks do," she explains.

After short spells with Richards Butler, Sedgwick Forbes and the Britannia P & I Club, Aleka joined Holman Fenwick and Willan in 1982 and she was the first Greek lawyer to work in the shipping department of a London law firm. She later married Colin Sheppard, who at that time was one of the firm's senior partners, and who today is an arbitrator and Honorary Secretary of the London Maritime Arbitrators Association. She stayed with Holmans for eleven years, and qualified in 1990 as a solicitor in England.

In 1993, the Faculty of Law at University College London invited Aleka to take over the shipping law department. She jumped at the chance, and one of the first things she did was to set up the Cadwallader Memorial Fund, in honour of her great mentor, to promote excellence in teaching and research, and in the hope of attracting more good teachers into the law faculty.

Once she had got her feet under the table at UCL, Aleka was motivated to create something new, something which could bring all the sectors of the shipping industry together for cross-fertilisation of ideas and knowledge, merging the practical with academic teaching, and which would offer the industry a worthwhile return on investment. That something was the London Shipping Law Centre. Aleka canvassed support among law firms, barristers and others, and duly formed a steering committee. The rest is history.

The centre has been a great success. It provides an industry forum and promotes excellence in London shipping services. In the process, it attracts invisible earnings in both the educational and practical sectors. Experts from many sectors of the industry take part and discuss ideas for new initiatives, reforms in shipping law, regulations, and practice. Members and supporters enthusiastically learn new skills, particularly in the area of legal and commercial risk management, which Aleka promotes through her teaching, her writing and the centre itself.

Wherever you go today in shipping, you are likely to find a former student who will sing Aleka's praises. Meanwhile, the name of the man whom Aleka and others regard as the prince of teachers lives on, not least in the form of the Cadwallader Memorial Lecture, which Aleka instituted and which was held for the fifth time in London last year. Aleka says Cadwallader managed to be a brilliant teacher yet still to be fun. Her own students say the same of her, and many are indebted to her for being a friend, as well as a teacher, in a strange city at a formative time in their lives.

There is a great deal more to Aleka than the LSLC. She runs her own marine risk management company, MLRM Consulting, and is the author of Modern Admiralty Law, a widely respected textbook. She says shipowners and operators are more receptive to the idea of loss prevention and risk management than they were ten years ago, and are more committed to stamping out sloppy practices. And you suspect that it is in this direction that Aleka's future career may eventually take her.

When that happens, commerce's gain will be academia's loss.