Pearl Moses has spent her career in the rooms where things go wrong. Not the dramatic wrongs that make the news — the ordinary ones. A missed limitation date. A payment to the wrong account. A file nobody had looked at for four months.

Dual-qualified as a barrister and a solicitor, she moved from practice into regulation and risk, and then into senior compliance leadership. Her work at The Law Society brought her into contact with thousands of legal professionals navigating obligations they understood in principle and struggled with in practice — anti-money laundering, supervision, competence, reporting, the quiet arithmetic of professional judgment.

What she noticed was consistent. The people in front of her were not careless. They were frightened. And the systems around them, however well-drafted, had almost nothing to say about fear.

The mistake is rarely the damage. The hiding is the damage.

That observation became a book. Owning Up to Mistakes, published by The Law Society, is a practical guide for the moment a professional realises something has gone wrong — how to think, who to tell, what to write down, and how to lead a team through it without either panic or cover-up.

It also became a TEDx talk, and then a training practice: workshops and keynotes for law firms, in-house teams, regulators, universities and professional bodies on accountability, ethical culture, supervision and psychological safety.

Alongside all of this, Pearl writes devotionals. The Deeper Still books and A Heart Full of Prayers come from the same place as her legal writing: a conviction that honesty is the beginning of everything good, and that people do their best work — and their best living — when they are not managing a secret.

She mentors, trains and encourages. She is at her most useful when the subject is difficult and the room is tense.