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Great expectations – what happened next for our 2014 class of rising stars

The 2014 GC Powerlist focused on the rising stars of the in-house community. Three years on, we look back at the career moves of our line-up

Featured in this year’s GC Powerlist, UniCredit’s global head of capital markets for legal, Alex Ainley, offers some advice to junior lawyers embarking on a career in-house: ‘When the opportunity to work on something arises, however menial it appears, take advantage of that opportunity. Always say yes.’

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Rising Stars: Financial Services

Marco Boldini

Director – European regulatory counsel

ETF SECURITIES (UK)

Marco Boldini serves as European regulatory counsel at ETF Securities, an asset management house focused on exchange-traded funds (ETFs), exchange-traded commodities (commodity ETCs) and exchange-traded currencies (currency ETCs) with offices in Jersey, London, New York, Sydney and Hong Kong. Based in London, Boldini is responsible for overseeing all regulatory functions across Europe and analysing the impact of emerging regulations. He is also chair of ETF Securities’ MiFID II committee, a member of its worldwide risk and compliance committee and leads the company’s advocacy and lobbying efforts by engaging with various European regulators.

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Rising Stars: Infrastructure, Transport and Real Estate

Samantha Sawyer

Legal director

AMEY

Since 2008, Samantha Sawyer has worked for infrastructure service provider Amey, a subsidiary of Spanish multinational Ferrovial. Sawyer is now legal director and sits as a member of the executive team on two of Amey’s core business units, Highways and Consulting and Rail, which together account for around half the group’s revenues.

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Rising Stars: Pharmaceuticals and Healthcare

Amanda Miller Collins

Vice president and lead European counsel

SHIRE

As a UK-focused, Irish-headquartered entity with operational headquarters in the US, primary listing on the London Stock Exchange and a secondary listing on Nasdaq, Shire’s legal team needs a lot of cross-border expertise. The former Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer lawyer Amanda Miller Collins has been part of Shire’s legal division since 2003 and, where the pharmaceutical industry has witnessed frenzied deal-making in recent years, has been tasked with helping co-ordinate the company’s growth.

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Rising Stars: Retail

Anna Lawrence

Legal director, offer and supply chain

KINGFISHER

Anna Lawrence is legal director of Kingfisher’s offer and supply chain business unit. Formed in 2015, the business brings together the buying teams for a large portfolio of home improvement brands, including B&Q and Screwfix in the UK and Brico Dépôt and Castorama in France, with Lawrence now overseeing everything from managing relationships with suppliers to monitoring IP on thousands of product lines globally.

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The Companies of Tomorrow: Fintech and Alternative Finance

SEEDRS

Industry/sector: Venture capital

Founded: 2009

Founders: Jeff Lynn, Carlos Silva

Chief legal officer: Karen Kerrigan

Based: London

Seedrs began as an MBA project at Oxford’s Saïd Business School before launching in 2012. In May that year it raised £1.3m in funding and received authorisation to become the first regulated equity crowdfunding platform in the world. Like Crowdcube, its model is based on bringing crowd investors and entrepreneurs together to invest in start-ups. It has now funded over 350 companies and helped to invest over £130m through campaigns on its platform.

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The Companies of Tomorrow: Trailblazers

SECRET ESCAPES

Industry/sector: Travel

Founded: 2010

Founders: Tom Valentine, Alex Saint

Head of legal: Christine Cordon

Heralded as one of the UK’s runaway tech success stories, members-only British travel company Secret Escapes has made its mark in the travel industry selling heavily discounted luxury hotel stays and trips through its website and mobile app.

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The Companies of Tomorrow: Technology and Digital Business

 

SKYSCANNER

Industry/sector: Travel

Founded: 2001

Founders: Gareth Williams, Barry Smith, Bonamy Grimes

General counsel: Carolyn Jameson

Founded in Edinburgh in 2001, Skyscanner has revenues of £120m and has offices in Edinburgh, Glasgow and London in the UK with additional offices in locations including Singapore, Beijing, Miami, Barcelona, and Tokyo. The site is available in over 30 languages and on average is used by 60 million people per month.

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The Companies of Tomorrow: Pharma and Life Sciences

DEEPMIND HEALTH

Industry/sector: Medical research/data

Founded: 2010 (DeepMind), 2016 (DeepMind Health)

Founders (DeepMind): Demis Hassabis (pictured), Shane Legg, Mustafa Suleyman

General counsel: Trevor Callaghan (DeepMind)

Based: London

In early 2016, Google-owned artificial intelligence (AI) specialist DeepMind announced it would create a healthcare division. DeepMind has chalked up some notable successes in advanced AI – including creating AlphaGo, the first programme to beat a human player at the game of Go – making the formation of DeepMind Health one of the most touted recent developments in the life sciences sector.

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GC Powerlist 2017: The Clients of Tomorrow

Comment and analysis

Sponsored

Rising Stars

The Companies of Tomorrow

(more…)

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Game on – consolidation and tougher regulation raise the odds for betting industry GCs

Increased regulation and high-level consolidation have raised the odds for in-house lawyers playing in the gaming and betting industry

When Edward Traynor took the general counsel (GC) position at Paddy Power in April 2015, he arrived in the middle of a £400m return of capital to the business’s shareholders. Once that was completed, he planned to settle in, restructure the legal team and take a holiday after the company’s annual general meeting (AGM). That holiday never happened. Instead Paddy Power agreed a £7bn merger with Betfair to create one of the world’s largest online gambling businesses with more than 7,000 staff and £1.2bn in sales. Even the best-laid plans often go awry.

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Hogan Lovells’ marriage has settled down but can the union blossom into global power couple?

As the Hogan Lovells union matures, Matthew Field and Victoria Young assess the global challenger’s prospects

As partners in a 2010 transatlantic marriage, the first few years of Hogan Lovells’ nuptials were not without issues. The proposition that a merger-of-equals between a major UK and a US law firm would fire growth and renew ambition was found wanting as the pair became caught up in complex integration. It also soon became apparent that – despite being initially billed as two institutions with much in common – a substantial cultural gap between Lovells and the more thrusting Washington DC-bred Hogan & Hartson was complicating its post-merger relaunch.

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The blueprint – clients and advisers scramble as the UK kicks off Brexit

While the outcomes are far from clear, Legal Business asks how advisers and clients can best tackle Brexit

 

‘There are known knowns… There are known unknowns… but there are also unknown unknowns.’

 

Former US Secretary of State for Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, took a lot of flak when he famously uttered these words in 2002, used with regard to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Today, they would not sound out of place coming from a lawyer speculating on the impact of Brexit.

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To the hilt – Meet the US firms going all in to dominate the City’s leveraged finance scene

Neel Sachdev, Kirkland & Ellis

Nowhere has the battle for City legal talent been more intense than in leveraged finance. Will the Americanisation of Europe’s credit markets drive on the advance of US firms or has the bubble burst?

‘It’s a shrinking universe in terms of those playing in the top tier,’ says one partner. ‘Two years ago there were about 15 firms which were completely capable and honest when they said: “We’re a leveraged finance house.” I don’t think that’s the case anymore. It’s a very, very small community and there are so many more clients concentrated with fewer firms.’

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Client profile: Ruwan De Soyza, Worldpay

Promoted to group GC at the start of the year, the experienced M&A lawyer on why he wants to stay hands-on

When Ruwan De Soyza arrived for his interview with former Worldpay general counsel (GC) Mark Chambers in 2011, he thought he was being considered for the role of GC for corporate services. Unbeknown to De Soyza, Chambers had a different path in mind, which ultimately led to him taking the group GC role in January this year.

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The last word: American dreams

‘We will continue to hire lawyers we see as adding something. That continues to be the mantra: hire great lawyers and your practice will grow.’

Richard East, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan

As our Global London report hits desks, the leadership at US law firms in the City weigh up the challenges ahead

MISSION STATEMENT

‘The firm has a clearly defined strategy for where and how we will grow. We will continue to build our top-ranked transactional, regulatory, litigation and trial practices and focus on the industries that are driving the global economy. Mission drift can happen if you take your eye off the strategy. The investments we make are for the long term and are key to ensuring we stay focused on what we need to do to serve our clients’ needs today, and in the future.’

Richard Trobman, vice chair, Latham & Watkins

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Clients and rookie lawyers – some awkward truths

Ah, despite the changing fashions, technology and economic realities of the day, in law you can always rely on that curious mix of mutual hypocrisy, miscommunication, mistrust and conflicting agendas between clients and law firms to endure.

The latest flashpoint is Deutsche Bank’s current panel review, which has pressed tendering law firms to write off time for trainees and newly-qualified lawyers handling its matters. Though it appears that not all have consented, for many this is the thin end of the wedge and a worrying sign that this US trend is making its way over here.

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