A warm congratulations to all of the nominees at the Legal Business Awards and especially to those of you who have made the GC Powerlist. We’re delighted to sponsor such a prestigious awards ceremony as well as celebrate top UK GCs.
Conduent Legal and Compliance Solutions (formerly part of Xerox) provides integrated data analytics, technology and expert professional services to help solve your litigation, investigations, compliance and business problems, and make the best decisions possible.
Continue reading “Information is your organisation’s lifeblood”
1. Have a plan and be proactive
It is important to have a career plan as the only person responsible for managing your career is you. If you cannot grow and develop within your own organisation (and often you can), think about whether you need to make a move. Talk to other in-house lawyers and if you are junior, find a mentor. A good recruiter will also advise you on career planning and what clients are seeking. Be strategic and keep growing.
Continue reading “Managing your career as an in-house counsel – the four key steps”
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.’
Continue reading “Great expectations – what happened next for our 2014 class of rising stars”
Head of legal
SEVEN ENERGY
Formerly of Herbert Smith Freehills in both London and Tokyo, the ten-year qualified Amos Carrington is already head of legal at Seven Energy, the leading integrated gas company in Nigeria, with upstream oil and gas interests in the region.
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.
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.
Continue reading “Rising Stars: Infrastructure, Transport and Real Estate”
Phil Hagan
Group legal director
PHOENIX GROUP
2016 was undoubtedly a standout year for Phil Hagan, who is primarily responsible for a team of two other lawyers who deal with corporate activity, including M&A, corporate finance and pensions. There are 14 lawyers in the overall Phoenix Group.
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.
Continue reading “Rising Stars: Pharmaceuticals and Healthcare”
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.
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.
Continue reading “The Companies of Tomorrow: Fintech and Alternative Finance”
Alexandra McGurk
Vice president and counsel, litigation
WILLIAM MORRIS ENDEAVOR ENTERTAINMENT/IMG
Recently promoted to vice president and counsel, litigation, Alexandra McGurk is described by one TMT partner as ‘a very clever lawyer who manages a diverse range of problems in a commercial manner with a high degree of focus on positive outcomes’.
Continue reading “Rising Stars: Technology, Media and Telecoms”
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.
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.
Continue reading “The Companies of Tomorrow: Technology and Digital Business”
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.
Continue reading “The Companies of Tomorrow: Pharma and Life Sciences”
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.
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.
While the outcomes are far from clear, Legal Business asks how advisers and clients can best tackle Brexit
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.
Continue reading “The blueprint – clients and advisers scramble as the UK kicks off Brexit”
‘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.’
