Heather Mitchell – Partner, chief risk officer, head of EMEA and global general counsel for Investments, Carlyle
Squire, Sanders & Dempsey, 1996-99
Kaiser Group International, 1999-2001
Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, 2001-02
Carlyle, 2002-present
I absolutely love my job. There’s a natural synergy in my roles as GC for global investments and chief risk officer – our team has evolved from being the best M&A lawyers managing transactions to also being a crisis response centre. This has happened as Carlyle has grown significantly over time and become much more complex – whether you’re looking at asset class, sector or geography.
We’ve been fortunate enough to save some fantastic deals and have righted some serious wrongs in some foreign jurisdictions, but it’s my team that I love the most. I work with the best M&A lawyers in the world. They’re commercial, responsive and collaborative, but more than that, they are just a fantastic group of humans with whom I am very fortunate to work.
There are 12 lawyers in my team and they each act as GCs for a particular asset class or fund that they’re responsible for across the firm. We’re pretty lean – rather than adding people, we’ve leveraged our partnerships with our external legal counsel to create an in-house trainee programme and a regular secondee programme. We’re cost-efficient so we have had to get creative. Because our team is so collaborative and we uniquely get to see across all our geographies and asset classes, it means that we can leverage a best practice we’ve done in, say Asia, into something in a different sector in the US. It means we can be innovative and create better or novel structures and terms.
To succeed in this role, first and foremost, you need strong analytical skills. You also have to be extremely commercial and responsive, but the key to our success is how well we work together. As my dad used to say, it’s about ‘How well you play in the sandbox’.
It’s the creativity that I value. When you’re managing transactions you can’t just say ‘no’. You need to say ‘you can’t do it that way, but this is the outcome we want and we can get there this way’. It’s about being extremely creative and marrying commerciality with downside protection; bringing the deal team and outside counsel along with you.
Around a third of my time now is probably on deals. The balance is split equally across my additional responsibilities: managing firmwide risk and also overseeing our teams, fund families, and strategic positioning in the EMEA region.
To build a successful career in-house in private capital, you need your sense of humour. For me it was also about the difference between being reactive and proactive. I’d rather have a say; I don’t want that late call on a Friday night when something has happened – I want to be in the room. It’s also about having that real hunger to get to a great outcome – that desire for Carlyle to be excellent.
