Christopher Stoakes has been a City insider for 25 years, as a financial journalist, partner in a City law firm and, latterly, a management consultant who advises City institutions on strategy and trains their staff in how the financial markets work.

Chris was a scholar at Charterhouse and at Worcester College, Oxford where he read law. He qualified as a solicitor at Freshfields (now Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer). He subsequently edited Global Investor, Risk Financier and International Financial Law Review among other finance publications and for eight years wrote the ‘Financial Lawyer’ column for Euromoney.

He has been by-lined in more than 30 business magazines and in most of the quality nationals. Chris was the marketing partner in a mid-sized City law firm and is now a director of knowledge and learning at a top 10 global law firm.

For ten years he was a faculty member of the MBA in Legal Practice at Nottingham Law School. His sole contribution to management literature is the Theory of Shambolic Organisations (the more successful an organisation is externally, the more chaotic its processes internally) – based largely on his observation of some City institutions!