Karen Hendy, RPC
While horror stories have become increasingly rare in recent years, RPC’s head of corporate Karen Hendy recounts an awkward story from early in her career when she was the only woman present in a meeting room. ‘One of the partners looked at me and asked me where my corporate partner was. The room went silent.’
Hendy counsels resilience in such situations: ‘These incidents are never about you. You just have to move on.’
Focusing on the retail and technology sectors, Hendy’s recent work highlights include representing Ceres Power Holdings in June 2023 on its transfer from AIM to the premium segment of the main market of the London Stock Exchange. ‘It was great to support a UK technology company moving to the main market, and it was clean tech – there were so many good things about it,’ she enthuses.
Gemma Roberts, Goodwin
Goodwin’s London office co-chair and private equity partner Gemma Roberts receives numerous plaudits for her work in the technology, retail and financial services sectors.
Roberts counts advising longstanding client GTT Communications on the $2.2bn sale of its global infrastructure business to I Squared Capital during the pandemic as a personal highlight. ‘It was a very long sale process, conducted entirely against the backdrop of Covid and lockdowns, throughout which the company faced many publicly documented challenges. Completing that deal was a game-changer for the company and all of its employees.’
Roberts articulates a similar experience to many of her female counterparts on tackling the return from maternity leave. ‘It feels career defining, navigating motherhood, coming back to work, readjusting, and assessing whether you still want partnership and deals. I realised that I still wanted it.’
And she argues that parenthood has enhanced her practice. ‘It made me more efficient and helped me focus. Caring for a child brings things into perspective and suddenly things become more manageable. Most of the time!’
Roberts recommends the personal touch with networking, noting: ‘It is about building that broader relationship, which can take years of staying in contact and being truly authentic, such as having calls just to stay in touch and talk about your family and what you did at the weekend. It’s so important to have that personal connection.’
Delphine Currie, co-chair of Reed Smith’s corporate group, approves of Roberts: ‘I really rate her. She has a good list of clients.’
Emma Danks, head of private equity and co-head of the global corporate/M&A group at Taylor Wessing, compliments Roberts on the quality of the practice she has built up at Goodwin.
Fatema Orjela, Sidley
‘When I started out, there was no-one with my background,’ muses Sidley’s much-vaunted private equity partner Fatema Orjela, on the dearth of role models on her path to partnership.
Then a salaried partner, Orjela was part of the storied Kirkland & Ellis team led by Erik Dahl and Christian Iwasko that transferred to Sidley in 2016 with ambitious plans to set up its City private equity practice.
Orjela defines her 2022 life sciences M&A work advising Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe and Hg Capital on a $5bn merger of Norstella with Citeline as one of the most fulfilling points in her career, explaining: ‘My skill is understanding people and their drivers, facilitating deals and bringing together lots of different people.’
Isabella Roberts, Simmons & Simmons
‘When I first joined the partnership, it felt like I was joining a boys’ club,’ asserts Simmons partner Isabella Roberts, an experience that resonates with many female peers. ‘A homogeneous partnership is a weak partnership,’ she argues.
A pivotal moment of Roberts’ career was acting for the developer on the $847m project finance package for its Mantoverde Sulphide Development project in Chile. This was the largest mining project to reach financial close since Covid and included $275m in equity funding from Mitsubishi Materials Corporation in exchange for a 30% stake in Mantoverde.
‘It was a genuinely intellectually difficult deal at times, but it was also really satisfying to get both parties to a successful outcome,’ Roberts reflects.
Ones to watch
Addleshaw Goddard private equity partner Gemma Phillips receives props for her reputation advising the likes of Bridgepoint, ICG and Phoenix Private Equity on their investment portfolios. Her standout work includes advising KPMG Pensions Partners on the carve-out of its business from KPMG and the ensuing investment by Exponent. Addleshaws’ Elvan Hussein is ranked in The Legal 500 as a Next Generation partner and counts among her clients Pfizer, HSBC, Thomson Reuters and Barclays. Others tipped as rising stars by The Legal 500 include, for M&A, Orrick’s Katie Cotton, Stephanie Featherstone from Simmons & Simmons, Morgan Lewis energy specialist Allison Soilihi and Baker Botts’ Sian Williams.