{"id":640586,"date":"2025-12-18T16:57:18","date_gmt":"2025-12-18T16:57:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/640586\/"},"modified":"2025-12-18T16:57:18","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T16:57:18","slug":"brexit-trade-deals-and-rows-with-china-life-as-a-law-grad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/640586\/","title":{"rendered":"Brexit, Trade Deals And Rows With China \u2014 Life As A Law Grad"},"content":{"rendered":"

LONDON \u2014 Matt Gass has worked on secret Brexit preparations, was part of the first trade negotiations led by the U.K. in decades and is now a senior lawyer<\/a> investigating allegations of unfair practices.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Fifteen years after graduating from Northeastern University, Gass is employed in a job \u2014 working for the Trade Remedies Authorities<\/a>, an arms-length government body \u2014 that did not exist when he was attending lectures in Boston. The British Council<\/a> suggests that as many as 65% of those currently at university will be employed in jobs that have not yet been formulated.<\/p>\n

For Gass, the spark behind his career was not the growth of artificial intelligence or the like. It was due to Brexit \u2014 the narrow vote in 2016 by the British public for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. In fact, his current employer, the TRA, was established only after Brexit had been enacted.<\/p>\n

Gass credits his degree program and extracurricular activities, including being part of the Model United Nations<\/a> society, for preparing him for his future career trajectory.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll those experiences \u2014 the lectures, the extracurriculars, the co-ops \u2014 fed through to being able to do the job which literally didn\u2019t exist when I trained to be a lawyer and first joined government,\u201d said Gass. \u201cIt has been a fascinating journey, completely unpredictable, but I definitely gained lots of different tools that have gone on to be very valuable.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AMatt Gass visited Northeastern\u2019s London campus to talk to them about his career as a lawyer in government. Photo by Mark Dutton for Northeastern University<\/p>\n

Gass grew up in the south of England \u2014 in \u201cold\u201d Hampshire, as he had to remind his college friends \u2014 but at age 15, the family moved to Washington, D.C., when his father, who was in the Royal Navy, was posted at the British Embassy. After completing school, Gass decided to stay in the U.S. for college and completed a political science major at Northeastern University.<\/p>\n

After securing his degree in 2010, he returned to the U.K. to undertake a law conversion course before being offered a training contract with Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer, a global law firm. After more than four years in the corporate sector, he decided to merge his two ambitions of working as either a lawyer or in government by becoming a public sector lawyer.<\/p>\n

In 2017, Gass entered HM Revenue & Customs, equivalent to the Internal Revenue Service in the U.S., just over a year after the EU referendum. The Brexit debate would come to define his six years at the tax authority.<\/p>\n

During negotiations on a future trading arrangement with Brussels, former British Prime minister Theresa May insisted<\/a> \u201cno deal is better than a bad deal.\u201d That stance meant the civil service was tasked with preparing for a potential eventuality where rules and international cooperation that Britain had been signed up to for almost 50 years could be upended overnight.<\/p>\n

The clock was also ticking. May had given the EU a two-year notice period to end the U.K.\u2019s membership, with March 29, 2019, marking the cliff-edge for a no-deal exit<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Just two months before the deadline, Gass was seconded to Operation Yellowhammer<\/a>, a secret plan to prepare for leaving without an agreement, in what was dubbed internally the \u201creasonable worst-case scenario.\u201d It examined chaotic prospects<\/a> as varied as disruptions to food and medicine supplies, to a rise in public disorder. Gass was responsible for escalating issues that were being flagged by those on the ground.<\/p>\n

The experience of working on a high-profile policy area that was constantly in the public eye was \u201csurreal,\u201d Gass, who is based in London, recalled. Whenever he switched on the radio, the news would be about what he was dealing with in a basement office in Whitehall day to day. It was like nothing he had experienced before.<\/p>\n

A change in prime minister eventually undid the Brexit deadlock<\/a> and Gass shifted to working on the new trade terms between the U.K. and its European neighbors.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He focused on the tax and level-playing field elements of what would become known as the EU-U.K. Trade & Co-operation Agreement, signed in December 2021, before jumping from one trade-related role to the next. Gass was involved in negotiations on a trade deal with Australia and the Windsor Framework, an agreement designed to ease post-Brexit border friction \u2014 along with political tensions \u2014 in Northern Ireland.<\/p>\n

Britain had effectively outsourced its international trading negotiations to the EU while a member, meaning experienced trade lawyers were hard to come by. After his Brexit travails, Gass suddenly found that he had acquired skills that would be useful to a country with a newly found independent trade policy.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy that point, I had been some version of a trade lawyer for about three years, which doesn\u2019t sound like much, but it was three years more than most people had because it was just not an area of law that this country did at that point,\u201d Gass explained.<\/p>\n

He moved to the TRA in 2023, which had been created only two years earlier to take over functions previously carried out by Brussels. His first major project was an 18-month investigation into Chinese dumping practices by producers of mechanical diggers. The probe led to hefty tariffs<\/a> being imposed<\/a> on Beijing exporters.<\/p>\n

It is an undertaking he told Northeastern London students about during a talk as part of this semester\u2019s Industry Insights<\/a> series. When Gass was in their shoes, the portmanteau \u2014 the two words together, \u201cBritain\u201d and \u201cexit,\u201d that make up \u201cBrexit\u201d \u2014 had not yet been conjured up, but it went on to set the course for his career.<\/p>\n

\u201cBrexit was what I worked on pretty much non-stop from the beginning of 2019, through to the Windsor Framework signing in early 2023,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd now I\u2019m working at the TRA, which wouldn\u2019t exist but for Brexit.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LONDON \u2014 Matt Gass has worked on secret Brexit preparations, was part of the first trade negotiations led…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":640587,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5226],"tags":[197126,802,748,2000,299,5187,1699,4884,25793,2725,197127,5500,285,1201,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-640586","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-brexit","8":"tag-alumni-stories","9":"tag-brexit","10":"tag-britain","11":"tag-eu","12":"tag-europe","13":"tag-european","14":"tag-european-union","15":"tag-great-britain","16":"tag-international-law","17":"tag-law","18":"tag-northeastern-alumni","19":"tag-political-science","20":"tag-politics","21":"tag-trade","22":"tag-uk","23":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115741632633859203","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=640586"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640586\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/640587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=640586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=640586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=640586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}