Mike’s Mechanics

White & Case sent Mike Goetz to London in 2000 to take its City finance practice to a new level. Thirteen years – and two law firms – later, he’s still one of the biggest names on the London scene. LB meets a banking legend.

Ropes & Gray’s London office has just turned three years old and more than a few cynics didn’t expect it to last that long. Former White & Case finance partners Maurice Allen and Mike Goetz had just spent a disastrous 18 months at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer before announcing that they would be fronting the Boston-based private equity firm’s London offering in 2009. The aftershock of the collapse of Lehman Brothers was in full effect and Allen and Goetz had failed in their quest to build a strong transactional banking practice at Freshfields to rival Clifford Chance and Allen & Overy.

Everyone knew the banks would start to shrink their lending activities and long-term relationships would be under threat, so even thinking about launching a fledgling practice seemed like madness. The knives were out, eyebrows were raised and Schadenfreude was evident. Some of the old guard hadn’t taken too kindly to the success the pair enjoyed at White & Case and were perfectly happy to see the Freshfields project blow up in their faces. Some said they’d never make Ropes’ London offering work. Others said the pair would take the profitable US firm for every guaranteed cent they could muster for a few years before going to watch cricket some place warm.

But three years on and Ropes’ London office is thriving. Goetz does startups very well: the banking partner from the US, who came to London indefinitely in 2000 and became one of the most successful finance lawyers in the City, has formed a seemingly unbreakable and highly effective partnership with Allen.

For those that thought his current project wouldn’t work out, the truth looks like this: Goetz is currently working on a second three-year plan with the full backing of the US executive. He insists he’s going nowhere soon.

 

New beginnings

A former colleague describes the transformation of Goetz on arriving in London 13 years ago as akin to being ‘captured by the Moonies’. Many agree that he certainly fell under Allen’s beguiling spell soon after the two began working together.

Goetz’s route into the law was unconventional. A glance at his CV reveals that he graduated from Ohio State University in 1983 with a BA in photography and cinema. He says that he quickly realised that the film industry was never going to be a great way to make a living and it wasn’t until he was ‘bumming around Australia’ that he met the father of a friend (who later went on to become a judge in New South Wales) who was passionate about the law and ‘busted a lot of the preconceptions I had about lawyers’. This set him on the path to graduating magna cum laude from Boston University School of Law in 1986. Boston is his home town, and he would return home in a way, some 23 years later, when he joined Ropes & Gray.

‘We’re competing mostly with US firms. That’s quite
easy for us because we’ve got long-term UK market players.’
Mike Goetz, Ropes & Gray

Goetz joined White & Case fresh out of law school, as it was one of the few truly international law firms around at the time. He’d travelled a fair bit and had particularly enjoyed Australia, hoping one day the firm would see the merit in opening a Sydney office. In truth, he only made it as far as Manhattan in those early years. Nonetheless, his arrival in New York was serendipitous: he began his legal career at a time when specialist forms of finance law were starting to get off the ground and he ‘fell’ into the banking practice.

‘The timing was good in the sense that leveraged buyouts (LBOs) were starting to become high finance as opposed to venture capital and the high-yield market was just beginning to take off in a major way,’ says Goetz. ‘At that time, I was right at the heart of three areas that were going to grow together for the rest of my career: LBOs, high yield and leveraged finance.’

As it turned out, Goetz would spend most of his time in New York working for one of White & Case’s trophy clients: Bankers Trust, which went on to be acquired by Deutsche Bank in 1998.

Goetz is keen to stress that he was only a junior member of the team back in those days, and the relationship with Deutsche Bank was deeply ingrained with a handful of White & Case partners in much the same way that it is today. No single White & Case partner is responsible for nurturing the relationship with Deutsche Bank, which is one reason why the institutional relationship between bank and firm has endured. There was a much closer relationship in New York between White & Case and Deutsche Bank than you’d find with any law firm in London with any financial institution, so Goetz quickly got to know some key players there.

He soon became popular with individuals at Deutsche Bank principally, according to a former colleague, because: ‘He is very numerate and would think like a banker, not just a lawyer. He understands the nuts and bolts of the matter and gets involved in the credit issues from the outset. That’s why clients love him.’

This point is echoed by Chronis Anoustis, head of debt products legal at Deutsche Bank, who says: ‘When people think of him, they often think of his business development and marketing skills, but Mike is first and foremost an outstanding lawyer. Classic client coverage and cross-selling have been some of the keys to his success – he has a unique ability to empathise with clients which sets him apart from the mainstream and allows him to serve them very effectively.’

Up until that point, White & Case’s London office had been running for 25 years in a reasonably low-key manner, with just over 50 lawyers and the finance team mostly handling issuer-side securities work and international project finance work. ‘It was more of an offshore practice and didn’t have a profile in the heart of the City,’ says Goetz. The firm certainly raised its profile in London when it hired Maurice Allen from Weil, Gotshal & Manges in a bid to make a real push into building an institutional finance practice in Europe. The arrival of Allen and five other partners from Weil Gotshal and Clifford Chance was one of the biggest stories of the year, giving White & Case a highly credible leveraged finance team in London overnight. If that wasn’t enough, the firm then took an even more unusual step, deciding to send a US-qualified banking partner to London to oversee the expansion of the practice. It was natural that the firm chose Goetz for this strange task, who had a good relationship with Deutsche Bank and a yearning to travel, to move to London with the aim of developing a European client relationship role. Goetz become a trailblazer in every sense; a US-qualified banking partner charged with making a London banking practice work. But there was method in the madness. Goetz knew a number of Deutsche Bank people in New York who had relocated to London, including Mike Schraga, who was senior officer for the leveraged credit area.

There was also a secondary purpose to the relocation. As a dyed-in-the-wool White & Case man and a finance specialist, Goetz’s mandate in London was also to keep a close eye on Allen – who had a reputation for being a maverick even then, and had just walked out on Weil Gotshal in spectacular fashion – and his team, to make sure they did things the White & Case way. But it didn’t quite work out like that. Goetz was to go native.

 

Dynamic duo

One of the first things Allen did was to take Goetz to see England play the West Indies in cricket. It was a rare day: the sun was shining. Allen wasn’t sure if his new American colleague would like the arcane British game but, as it turned out, it was a masterstroke: the pair found a common interest and anyone who knows Goetz knows how obsessive he is about cricket now.

Depending on how you view it, it is either to their advantage or their detriment that Goetz and Allen are seemingly always joined at the hip. The consensus is that, rather like two pieces of expensive antique china, they are worth more as a pair. The problem with that assumption is twofold. One, it ignores the fact that both are first-rate lawyers in their own right, each with their own impressive client lists. Secondly, it allows for a very easy and common misconception about the respective roles they play in their partnership. The pair are often fondly described as ‘the dynamic duo’, or ‘the Two Ronnies’, and many that don’t know them well assume that Goetz is the straight man, the conservative foil to Allen’s flamboyance. The truth is more nuanced than that.

Most people who know Goetz are clear that he is not Allen’s dependable sidekick. ‘It’s hugely simplistic to say that Mike is the “straight man”,’ says one experienced London-based legal recruitment consultant. ‘It just plays out that way at times but they are both larger than life characters. They are both old school in the most positive sense and hugely entertaining. Mike is one of these people that can use their highly attuned marketing personality and technical ability to mine their chosen area of work.’

‘I think they dovetail well together,’ says a former White & Case colleague. ‘I don’t think Mike would have enjoyed as much success in the early days without Maurice, but you know what? I don’t think Maurice would have had that success without Mike either, because Mike gave Maurice an awful lot of credibility, with Deutsche Bank in particular.’

‘The different ways of doing business in the UK
and US has been integral to everything that I’ve done.’
Mike Goetz, Ropes & Gray

Goetz says he never feels that he is in Allen’s shadow. For him, the partnership works because they have complementary talents.

‘We’ve become interchangeable in some people’s eyes,’ he says. ‘We say we’re very different and we probably are but we do sit in a room and finish each other’s sentences. Maurice likes to be the spokesperson and my life is easier if he gets to be the spokesperson. One thing that Maurice does better than me is that he is very good at motivating people.’

Allen, for his part, says that they are considered a double act and are usually referred to as ‘M&M’. He recalls that one letter came to the office addressed to ‘Maurice Goetz’ and they joked about becoming a single entity. ‘However, we both have very different skills and you can see the benefit of having both of us rather than just one of us,’ he says.

‘Mike will tend to be the consensus builder and – this has been interchangeable – historically I’ve been the one who pushes a bit more,’ he adds. ‘I probably tend to do more of the strategic stuff, Mike tends to do more of the operational management. It’s not simply good cop, bad cop though – we will swap over. I think we intuitively know when it’s best for one of us to take the lead on something and there’s a complete absence of competition or egos between us, which is rare.’

‘It’s a cliché but they do complement one another very well,’ says Anoustis at Deutsche Bank. ‘But they also each work well on their own, with their own particular areas of focus and interest.’

Jason Bruhl, head of the EMEA High Yield Syndicate for Citigroup, knows Goetz well having met him in the late 1990s when he worked at Bankers Trust and moved over to London about the same time in 2000. He was introduced to Allen around ten years ago and describes Goetz and Allen’s relationship as ‘highly effective’ and it’s not uncommon to use them both on the same transaction. Of Goetz he says: ‘I think his greatest strength is that he has such a thorough understanding of the market not just from an issuer’s perspective but also an underwriter’s perspective. If you walk into a meeting with him you know you’re going to get good advice looking at things from both sides of the table and looking at where things should end up.’

‘My key strength as a lawyer is analytical skill,’ says Goetz. ‘I would say Maurice’s key skill as a lawyer is creativity. Maurice sometimes gets tarred with the idea that he’s a very good client man but not a lawyer. He’s actually an extremely good lawyer. That’s important because the good client men don’t last forever in the law.’

Goetz describes the relationship as ‘low beta but volatile’. He says: ‘It’s a bit of a caricature. Maurice is seen as the maverick and I’m seen as the conservative one. It’s not true but it actually suits everyone’s purpose. Like any caricature it’s based in fact.’

Goetz admits that they got on like the proverbial house on fire from the outset when Allen came over to New York as part of the interview process for White & Case. But when he arrived in London, the way Allen and his team went about business was a real eye-opener. ‘It was pretty clear to me that Maurice and the rest of the team that we hired did things very differently to how we did things in New York, and I was very interested in that,’ he says. The fundamental differences included the fact that UK firms seemed much better organised as businesses, whereas US firms were often just a collection of lawyers. The training was better and the level of sophistication in business development and marketing in London was light years ahead of New York.

‘The different ways of doing business in the UK and US has been integral to everything that I’ve done,’ he says. ‘What we tried to do at White & Case, which I think we were very successful in doing, was to create the best of both worlds between the UK and US practices.’

And this is where Goetz’s former colleague’s reference to him being ‘captured by the Moonies’ becomes apparent. Sent to London to oversee the growth of the new practice and to keep those pesky English guys in check, Goetz found himself seduced by Allen’s dark arts.

‘Instead of protecting the White & Case franchise, he bought into the Maurice Allen franchise,’ says a source close to events at the time. ‘Before too long, Mike was up there with Maurice arguing for all of Maurice’s initiatives.’

Not that Goetz was able to do much else in those early days. When he arrived, he found that all of the new recruits, including Allen, were on gardening leave. ‘I had two months of taking the same guy I knew from Deutsche Bank out to lunch,’ he recalls.

The first couple of years were slow. Breaking into the London banking scene was tough, even with a nailed on White & Case client such as Deutsche Bank. At that time, according to Goetz, the bank was using Clifford Chance, Allen & Overy, Shearman & Sterling and Norton Rose in the UK. ‘For a variety of reasons we were able to move those guys aside,’ he says. ‘We became the number one adviser to Deutsche Bank in Europe and because of the US relationship that meant we were number one for them globally.’

 

Greener grass

Over the next five or six years, during the boom years in the global market, Goetz helped shape one of the pre-eminent finance practices in London, a legacy that still remains today. In 2007 it was reported that Deutsche Bank generated £10m in fees for White & Case, overseen by Goetz. But by 2008 news broke that he and Allen would be leaving White & Case for what was ultimately an ill-fated move to Freshfields.

The pair had become increasingly unsettled at White & Case, largely down to a tussle between Allen’s post-2000 new regime, and the old guard: the legacy White & Case partners who had led the office before Goetz and Allen turned up. As we reported, following an exodus of White & Case partners in 2010 (see ‘Without a paddle’, LB203, page 34), the atmosphere in the London office became increasingly toxic, particularly after significant changes to the global management and executive team. The battle for chair of the firm in 2007 ended in a two-horse race between Hugh Verrier and head of finance Eric Berg. Naturally, Goetz and Allen backed their department head and friend, Berg. They lost, making their position in the firm untenable.

Goetz is keen not to rake over the coals of what he calls ancient history. ‘The market didn’t dictate a change in strategy for us, a change in management dictated a change in strategy,’ he says. ‘We had a change in management and that wasn’t going to suit us. So we left, quite simply. It’s enough to say two people ran [in the election]: the guy who was head of our group globally, and our friend, and another guy who wasn’t, so we left. There’s no sense in analysing it any further than that. The firm had changed and we no longer felt comfortable there.’

Never ones to do things under the radar, Goetz and Allen’s defection to Freshfields had tongues wagging immediately. Here were two heavyweights who had built up a successful practice for a US firm in London joining a British blueblood, a firm that started life advising the Bank of England in 1743. Freshfields was Manchester United, where no individual partner was bigger than the team. Here were two guys that liked to shake things up a little. It was never going to work, cried the market. And, as it turned out, it didn’t.

‘After Lehman, the appeal of a transactional banking
practice changed for anybody who was involved
in it. We’ve seen that in spades.’
Mike Goetz, Ropes & Gray

Goetz is quite clear on why it didn’t work: Lehman Brothers. He and Allen joined the Magic Circle firm in March 2008, six months before the bank fell. He says that there was a lot of momentum to move there, as the idea was for them to build a transactional banking practice. Freshfields had big name banking clients, including Deutsche Bank, but work for those institutions was largely in corporate, regulatory or litigation matters. Partners David Ereira and Brian Gray had left for Linklaters the year before and Allen & Overy and Clifford Chance were the undisputed kings of transactional work for banks. Freshfields’ then finance head Perry Noble talked about their arrival filling a fundamental gap in its banking practice. Six months later, all that ambition evaporated.

‘After Lehman, the appeal of a transactional banking practice changed for anybody who was involved in it,’ says Goetz. ‘We’ve seen that in spades. Take a look at what’s gone on in all the big banking practices – they’ve all had to shrink them massively.’

However, other observers feel that the pair’s Freshfields project was doomed from the start for a number of reasons. Lehman certainly didn’t help, but those close to the situation have suggested that Allen and Goetz were two big entrepreneurial partners in a team that ultimately had little appetite for building a transactional banking practice. Lehman just sealed the deal. Freshfields declined to comment for this feature, with chief executive Ted Burke simply saying that he wished Goetz well. But for many, this was never going to work because there was a cultural misfit.

‘If you combine the fact that on a personality level they weren’t perhaps the most natural fit for the firm, with the bottom falling out of the market, it was never going to work,’ suggests one senior legal recruitment specialist. ‘If they had gone in and ramped the practice up, leveraged off the client base and delivered transactional work, then all might have been forgiven personality wise. But we’ll never know for sure.’

Goetz thinks that the suggestion that there was a fundamental cultural mismatch between them and the Freshfields partnership is exaggerated and it was simply the market that dictated that the project was doomed to fail. ‘Freshfields tolerates quite a few divergent cultures: it’s not a factory of robots, so I don’t think that was it,’ he says. ‘I think it was the pressures of the reality of what Lehman was going to mean for the foreseeable future combined with realising that a lot of what I really enjoyed about my time with White & Case wasn’t necessarily going to be available to me at Freshfields. Freshfields was just simply too large and too established a practice.

‘Even though White & Case was a large and established practice it wasn’t when we started there, and we got to shape a lot of it – we had a lot of influence and input and that stuff all disappeared from us at Freshfields. Just looking at the day-to-day job it just wasn’t going to be as appealing,’ he says.

Whatever the reasons behind the failure, the writing was on the wall. It was a miserable time for every banking lawyer in the City and these two had the added weight of coming in at the top of Freshfields’ equity with targets to meet. The end was inevitable.

 

Pastures new

Goetz left Freshfields in August 2009. He says, at the time, he and Allen weren’t even sure if they would be working together again. ‘In fact, I would have bet that we wouldn’t have worked together,’ he says. ‘At White & Case we were such a team but at Freshfields we were just two disparate banking partners.’

Smart money said that Allen, possibly accompanied by Goetz, would go to Greenberg Traurig Maher in London. Allen knew Paul Maher well: Rowe & Maw was at one time mooting a tie-up with White & Case before finally deciding to team up with Mayer Brown. But Goetz had been talking to a headhunter that he knew well and Ropes & Gray came up. Being a Boston boy, he knew of the firm but had no idea how far it had come, particularly in fashioning a strong private equity practice in the US. He admits to being ‘flabbergasted’ at how big the firm had become in private equity and the fact that he hadn’t known about it before. But this time he wasn’t going in blind.

‘I didn’t do any due diligence before I went to Freshfields,’ he says. ‘It was Freshfields – why would you need to due diligence on Freshfields? Had I asked a few questions I probably would have figured out that it wasn’t right for my temperament and not what I wanted to do. I asked a lot of questions with Ropes as I didn’t want to make that mistake again. Answers were consistent and, when we got here, we quickly realised that it was as advertised.’

The startup nature of the opportunity with Ropes particularly appealed to Goetz. This is what he did with White & Case. Although there was an established London office in situ when he arrived in London, he and Allen had built up the firm’s leveraged finance practice themselves. Here was an opportunity to start afresh, albeit in the middle of the most unforgiving market conditions of all time.

‘Basically there weren’t many opportunities to do exactly what I wanted to do, which was build another business in a law firm,’ he says. ‘There were a lot of offers to go and sort out existing London offices of US firms, but that meant just going in and firing people and that’s never been my strong suit.’

In his initial meetings with Ropes & Gray’s executive in the US, which he describes as ‘defining meetings where you walk into a room and no-one is sure what is going to happen’, he confesses that he was unsure whether a traditional and conservative firm such as Ropes would take to him, a big name with a significant media profile and his own baggage. He met Brad Malt, chair of the firm’s management committee and founder of Ropes’ private equity practice; Newcomb Stillwell, strategic development partner; and David Chapin, another private equity specialist and member of the firm’s policy committee.

Chapin recalls not having high hopes about meeting Goetz, because the firm had been speaking to people about opening in London for some time with little success. It was a sticky Friday afternoon in August in New York, and Chapin confesses that he only went at the request of Malt. ‘It was a meeting that frankly I was looking for ways to get out of, but I couldn’t be happier that I went,’ he says. ‘I thought it would take half an hour, 45 minutes at most, but we ended up talking to Mike for the best part of three hours and there was an almost immediate personal chemistry as well as an interesting idea for a plan of how to start a London office.’

Goetz impressed on them two key points. The first was that, contrary to received wisdom, it was the ideal time to launch in London through a finance practice, as the talent pool that the firm could pick from was much richer than it had ever been because so many people were disenfranchised at their current London firms. The second key point was that if the firm was serious about making it work in London, they needed Maurice Allen on board too.

This time it was Goetz who had to be the persuader, the deal broker. Allen was very reluctant at first and agreed to meet with Ropes as a favour to Goetz but, according to Goetz, ‘as always with Ropes once you get under the hood you think: “that’s really nice”’, and eventually Allen was sold. Goetz joined as a partner and Allen got on board as a consultant initially, because according to Goetz there was no legal structure in place at the time to admit a UK citizen into the partnership.

What Goetz brought to the table at Ropes wasn’t just profile or gravitas, it was the experience of setting up in London, learning from his own mistakes, and seeing all the mistakes made by countless US firms in London. He and Allen had a clear plan and said from the outset that they wouldn’t go off piste, and they haven’t.

‘They were an absolute lock-on for Ropes, it was the perfect proposition,’ says a senior City-based recruitment consultant. ‘Given what they did before, and Ropes needing to develop a UK practice, it made perfect sense for the firm to hire two guys that knew how to come in and develop something.’

And while many questioned the merits of a greenfield office of a US firm amid the biggest financial crisis in history, Goetz is phlegmatic. ‘The timing of it all didn’t matter to me as I needed to get to work quickly,’ he says matter-of-factly. In truth, the timing worked very much in Ropes’ favour: a new world order had arrived and opportunities for the nimble and the entrepreneurial were there.

‘Other law firms didn’t pay much attention to Ropes opening in London as they were caught up in their own crap and didn’t see someone opening amid the worst financial period in history as much of a challenge,’ Goetz says. ‘The current climate has played into the hands of US firms. One of the things I said to the Ropes guys in that first meeting is if you’re serious about opening in London then now is the perfect time to do it because the talent pool would be extremely rich. There are a lot of lawyers either losing their jobs, or sick and tired of their jobs. But more importantly, chaos in the market causes opportunity.’

The nimble, entrepreneurial atmosphere at a US firm’s fledgling practice suits Goetz and he says he’s more content than ever. He’s certainly not envious of banking teams at large UK firms.

‘The banks are shrinking their balance sheets. Everyone knows it, it’s not a surprise. They haven’t finished yet and will continue to do it. The only way to reduce their balance sheet is to get rid of businesses, stop accumulating assets. And for those firms that are getting 50-60% of their revenues from banks you have two choices – you either shrink or you take market share from other people. It’s tough out there and that was obvious after Lehman.’

He adds that the shift in the market towards alternative sources of funding ‘couldn’t have been better’ for Ropes & Gray. Most of the London office’s practice areas feature those types of clients, particularly private equity and hedge funds. Many of these alternative financing sources are American. ‘It’s like a replay of the LBO market and the high-yield market, where you have a number of Americans over here that know the US firms well,’ he says. He adds that the market for competition is much smaller for Ropes as the firm is only really competing with other US firms for this type of work. He doesn’t have to take on the might of the large UK-based banking practices as they are far too wedded to the banks.

‘We have a very nice hedge in our practice here,’ he adds. ‘We have restructuring and all of our finance lawyers do restructuring; we have high yield and mezzanine finance, so either of the subordinated slices – whichever one is hot, we’re in that market. So we have a lot of nice natural hedges to our business.’

‘We’re competing mostly with US firms,’ he says. ‘That’s quite easy for us to do because we’ve got long-term UK market players, whereas a lot of US firms have guys over here that they sent from New York or they’ve got second-tier players. This plays right into our hands because we’ve got credible people who have been doing this for their entire careers in London and we know the market. We’re not competing against Clifford Chance or Allen & Overy – we’re not really competing with the toughest players out there. I’m not sure whether it’s strategic brilliance, luck, or both, but it’s worked out extremely well for us.’

 

No end in sight

Whether this clever strategic positioning in London translates into impressive financial performance is unclear. Ropes & Gray moved up two places in this year’s Global 100 to 29, with turnover up 10% to $903.1m. More importantly, the firm has a fantastic 46% profit margin and an average profit per equity partner of $1.5m.

As for London, Goetz is tight-lipped, saying that the firm doesn’t report on a country basis. The firm also has a closed-book compensation system, so partners do not know what each other are earning. All Goetz will say on the subject is: ‘If we had numbers, I’d be pretty pleased with them.’

‘We’re thrilled,’ says Chapin. ‘In a management and policy meeting the other day we were remarking on how, three years since it opened, the London office has been more successful than we imagined, both in terms of the calibre of people we have hired as well as the calibre of clients we are acting for. It’s a strategically very important office for the firm and we’re very happy with how it’s going.’

Goetz is currently working on the next three-year plan and has no intention to retire soon. ‘He has that classic American attitude to want to carry on until he’s 75 and he probably will,’ says one London-based recruiter. He’s fortunate in the sense that US firms have a much greater respect for age and experience. ‘Age and experience can be extremely helpful when you’re handling tricky stuff,’ he points out.

He came to London 13 years ago on an ‘indefinite’ basis, with the understanding that he’d be here at least five to ten years. He says that his place in the UK is permanent ‘unless I go and do something some place else’. If he was asked to return to the States by Ropes to do certain things he might consider it but he would struggle because he wouldn’t have the chance to watch his beloved cricket. As someone who has known him for more than ten years says: ‘He’s more English than most English people.’

‘It’s hard to overstate how much fun this is,’ Goetz says. ‘Working in a professional environment that you really like, with people that you really like, doing stuff that is challenging and interesting – it doesn’t get much better than that. My wife asks me if I still like going to work every day and I do. If you’ve got smart people who are ambitious and applying themselves and the morale is good, it’s pretty hard not to be successful – you’ve got to be really screwing things up not to be successful because it’s a virtuous circle. If clients enjoy the experience they’ll call you again.’

Talk of a finance partner having fun and having good morale within their team seems unheard of these days. But Mike Goetz, as the original US-qualified partner to make it big in banking in London, has always done things a little differently. Long may it continue. LB

mark.mcateer@legalease.co.uk