When Nigel Morris-Cotterill was fifteen, he began working in a solicitors' office in his school holidays. The firm, in Stockton-on-Tees in the north east of England, put him in the articled clerks' room where, from the beginning, he did proper work, mostly in litigation.
In 1986, qualified and with long experience in hand, he launched his own general practice firm in a London suburb. In the early 1990s, he merged that firm with a firm in Bloomsbury which, following the departure of the senior partner, moved into the City.
On 1 April 1994, a bank holiday in the UK, Morris-Cotterill opened a letter from The Law Society of England and Wales. It contained details of The Money Laundering Regulations 1993 which were coming into force that day.
In that moment, Morris-Cotterill realised that all the years of working in criminal law, family law, contracts, commercial litigation, corporate law, trusts, property law, compliance and general business law had all been in preparation for one thing: understanding the risks that were presented to businesses, especially but not only those in the financial sector, of laws to combat money laundering.
That day was the day that Morris-Cotterill became a counter-money laundering strategist and a risk and compliance specialist with a special ability to look at financial crime from a holistic perspective and to look over the horizon.
His vision protects your organisation and its people.
Morris-Cotterill became the voice of choice for the BBC and Sky News in relation to financial crime matters; he was interviewed by many major international newspapers and many commissioned articles from him, he published academic papers in peer reviewed journals, he presented at conferences around the world including alongside many senior officers of supranational bodies, nascent FIUs and lead investigation agencies, he wrote books and he worked with others on the development of remote learning. In 1997, he launched "Dirty Cash," lectures on audio cassette and the fore-runner of the podcasts so popular today.
Alongside that he developed World Money Laundering Report and, in 2002, designed and commissioned the e-learning platform Quick To Learn More.
Never slowing down, Morris-Cotterill spent the next couple of decades criss-crossing the world advising and educating, holding high-level Fora, writing for leading publications such as The Banker and Thompson Reuters and, his most plagiarised and most cited article, Foreign Policy and many more.
In 2020, the original platform having at last reached its end of life, Morris-Cotterill launched Financial Crime Risk and Compliance Training.
You can find out about the services Morris-Cotterill provides here.
His personal website, including his blog, is at CounterMoneyLaundering.com