He was called to the bar by Lincoln's Inn in 1872, but had little work in London, and, after a few years' waiting, he went to Liverpool as a "local," it is said upon the advice of Sir Henry Jackson, whose pupil he had been.
At this time, Sir Marshall Warmington was at the height of his renown, and Neville, who had the most versatile intellect, was looked upon as an easy second to him in the Court of Mr. Justice Kekewich.
He had been called upon to hear several heavy and difficult cases, such as In re the Law Guarantee Trust and Accident Society (Limited), Re the Birkbeck Permanent Building Society, in which his decision was affirmed by the Court of Appeal, though the order of that Court was varied in the House of Lords, and the famous Osborne case, in which his decision that a rule of a trade union authorizing the application of union funds in payment of Labour members of Parlianment was not ultra vires was reversed.
From the outset of his career he showed great ability in the handling of his cases, but it was only when his powers began to be recognized that he turned to a sufficiently close study of the law.
Few men at the Bar burnt more of the midnight oil, and, though in recent years his health began to fail, a physical endurance, begotten, no doubt, of his athletic training, together with an extraordinarily alert and active mind, carried him through periods of toil in which others could not have long survived.
No man possessed more fully the gift of divining quickly the temperament of a witness, of framing his questions in terse and homely language, and of coaxing a vital admission, as if he were merely seeking the disclosure of a harmless fact.