Star studded career stories of a St Albans lawyer kept an audience in Warsaw “rapt” recently.

Lawyer Peter Goodman, who is a current director of the St Albans Chamber of Commerce and the St Albans Enterprise Agency, and a trustee and director of Herts Mind Network, was asked by the Warsaw Bar Association to travel to Poland.

He was the guest speaker in the association’s second International Conference (March 27), which took place at the University of Warsaw - following in the footsteps of Cherie Blair last year.

Peter spoke to 120 people for about an hour in English on his eventful career - he has met many celebrities, including Jeremy Clarkson, Kate Winslet, Hugh Grant, and Naomi Campbell.

As a prominent motorsports lawyer, Peter worked with many F1, world rally and Moto GP champions, including Alain Prost and Damon Hill.

From successfully defending the Williams F1 team through Ayrton Senna’s death trial to changing privacy law in Naomi Campbell’s rehabilitation newspaper case, Peter has experience with a wide-range of criminal cases.

Locally he defended the St Albans poisoner Graham Young, who gave thallium to his family and colleagues while working in Bovingdon, disguising the deaths as natural causes.

Peter is a specialist in corporate and commercial law and since those cases he has been working as a partner at SA Law for 13 years: “I wasn’t sure how it was going to go because I haven’t done much public speaking in the last few years, and I couldn’t get through a rehearsal.

“But it turned out excellent, they were rapt - everyone seemed interested in what I had to say.”

Although he said he did not want to made too many assumptions until he has seen the video of his speech and can truly judge how it went.

While in the country for five days, Peter also enjoyed Poland’s countryside and the city’s old town - which he was surprised to find had been bombed during World War Two and completely rebuilt by the Communist regime.