Educated at Whitgift School in Croydon and St Edmund Hall, Oxford,[1] he became a solicitor in 1973 and was called to the Bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1976.

He became a QC in 1990, working at 7 King's Bench Walk, where he was noted as a leading "commercial silk" by The Lawyer, who said he specialised in "energy, insurance and reinsurance, professional negligence and shipping and maritime law."

Cooke was knighted in 2001, and that October he became a High Court judge, Queen's Bench Division, Commercial.

[6] Among the cases he has presided over as judge were the 2007 royal blackmail plot,[7] the trial of Armel Gnango for the murder of Magda Pniewska,[citation needed] the trial of Roshonara Choudhry for stabbing Stephen Timms MP[8] and the 2011 Pakistan cricket spot-fixing scandal.

[9] Between 2013 and 2016, he presided over the case of R v Tom Hayes, which saw him hand the largest ever sentence for white collar crime in the UK.