Lucy Vernall
FUNDING CIRCLE
Team size: 32
Major law firms used: Ashurst, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Simmons & Simmons, Womble Bond Dickinson
‘When things are going well in legal and compliance, nobody notices.’
Peer-to-peer lender Funding Circle capitalised on its status as one of the most high-profile fintech businesses in the UK with a September 2018 initial public offering, which valued the company at £1.5bn.
Global general counsel Lucy Vernall was heavily involved with the IPO, calling on Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer as external adviser. Says Trainline GC Neil Murrin: ‘Lucy was the lead on the IPO. Where I really admire people is when I see them adding value above the GC role, such as other commercial activities or exceptional projects.’
Funding Circle was founded in 2010 and has expanded into the US, Germany and the Netherlands. Its financial matchmaking service has seen nearly 80,000 investors lend more than £4.2bn to businesses, earning £230m in interest. Vernall was the company’s first UK lawyer in 2014, but the legal and compliance team has since grown to 32 people. The team is split across the four countries it operates in, although most are in the UK, with Vernall aligning her team closely to the managing directors in each of those.
Most of the work is done in-house apart from areas where the team has no internal expertise or on matters that require a second opinion, such as a regulatory issue. The IPO is obviously Funding Circle’s headline transaction of recent years, but other highlight projects have including receiving full authorisation from the Financial Conduct Authority in 2017, as well as the company’s listing of an SME Income Fund on the London Stock Exchange.
One of Vernall’s main challenges has been in applying a body of law to Funding Circle’s relatively new business model. How they are applied, however, is aided by the company being a founding member of the Peer-to-Peer Finance Association.
‘We’re trying to make sure the business is ready – there are many challenges for a fast-growing business that is very open and transparent when it comes to compliance – and making sure we can retain the culture while having the right controls in place,’ Vernall comments. ‘When things are going well in legal and compliance, nobody notices.’
Sam Ross
WORLDREMIT
Team size: Seven
Major law firms used: Addleshaw Goddard, Bird & Bird, Orrick, Slaughter and May, Stephenson Harwood
‘We want to build a team of people who all want to be the head of legal.’
‘If you want to join a start-up like WorldRemit, make sure you have mates who aren’t lawyers,’ GC Sam Ross advises. ‘Don’t communicate in an overly formal way. In a small company, you’re not going to get that formal deference you’re used to from private practice.’
But it is not a case of dumbing down. At the fast-paced mobile payment platform WorldRemit, Ross had to take a crash course in finance to make sure he was up to speed. A ten-week-long course at City University covered the basics, but Ross argues it has made a big difference: ‘If you don’t understand the finance lingo being used by everyone around you, then you won’t be able to give effective advice.’
WorldRemit, founded in 2010 as a mobile-first remittance platform, hired Ross as its first in-house lawyer in 2016. He has since brought in two more fully qualified lawyers, with a view to build out the function further in 2019. Ross has his eye on a specific type of lawyer: ‘We want to build a team of people who all want to be the head of legal. It’s not like Deliveroo or Uber, where we can afford to have lawyers with different specialisms.’
With the ability to send money to over 140 countries worldwide and just the small London legal team to back it up, Ross and his lawyers are obliged to have a thorough understanding of local laws when it comes to moving money. WorldRemit has rapidly announced partnerships in recent months to expand its international footprint: in February 2019 the company struck a deal with Enat Bank to allow digital money transfers to Ethiopia and in January a similar partnership paved the way for transfers to Nepal. The legal team is vital to forming these pathways.
On leadership, Ross emphasises the need to walk before you can run. He concludes: ‘I try to throw people in at the deep end even if it involves making mistakes. You learn so much from it! It’s important to create a supportive environment for making mistakes.’
Donna Rix
CITADEL EUROPE
Team size: 12
Major law firms used: Arthur Cox, Latham & Watkins, Lewis Silkin, Linklaters, Matheson, Norton Rose Fulbright, Sidley Austin, Simmons & Simmons, Slaughter and May
Donna Rix, GC for Citadel Europe, has been working on critical regulatory tasks since joining the company in 2016. Based in London, she leads the European legal and compliance function for Citadel, a hedge fund firm with over $29bn in assets under management, and Citadel Securities, a global market-making business.
Amid Brexit uncertainty, Rix and a team of around 12 lawyers in London and Dublin have been making contingency plans to ensure the company can continue trading on all outcomes of the political deal.
Rix says there is more regulatory change to come over the next few years following the publication of the European Banking Authority’s report on investment firms in December 2015, which reviewed the prudential standards to ensure investment firms manage their business risks responsibly.
The company does not operate a formal panel but works with a small group of advisers that Rix says are familiar with Citadel and understand its culture. ‘It’s my preference not to spread work too thinly but to use a small number of experts who know us and our business model well.’
This past year Rix has instructed her team to reflect more on how tasks can be better performed, including making better use of technology in the workplace. She is optimistic about tech and its ability to support legal and compliance teams, but does not play down the importance of good communication between colleagues and business partners.
‘I encourage members of my team to be proactive and work closely with regional counterparts and leaders across the business, which is essential in a fast-moving organisation like ours.’
She appreciates the diverse workload that invariably comes with the job of GC: ‘I like the varied nature of the role; one day you’re reviewing employment contracts and the next you’re creating a new legal framework for new operations in Dublin, so you’re never bored.’
Monica Risam
LOMBARD INTERNATIONAL ASSURANCE
Team size: 40
Major law firms used: Allen & Overy, Baker McKenzie, DLA Piper, Linklaters
Monica Risam, the highly regarded former Aviva UK Life GC, joined Luxembourg wealth-structuring company Lombard International Assurance as Europe GC in January 2018.
Since joining Lombard, Risam has been ‘laying foundations’ for the team to have a legal-partner mindset, encouraging lawyers to sit down with the business. She leads a multidisciplinary team across legal, regulatory affairs, company secretariat, risk and compliance.
‘We’re here to support the business and help it grow. Management and stakeholders see me as a problem solver and that’s one of the most challenging and interesting things about being a GC. It requires skill and judgement to understand when you need to dive in and when it’s time to take a step back.’
Lombard is owned by private equity giant The Blackstone Group and has €74.6bn in global assets under management. Risam, widely cited for her role in helping make Aviva’s highly regarded legal team become a pacesetter during her six years there, also joined Lombard’s executive committee and reports to Lombard Europe chief executive Axel Hörger.
Risam helped organise Lombard’s first women’s network to support female talent in the company and is now looking to set up a formal adviser panel. ‘I’ve started doing that with a couple of firms because I believe in a longer-term panel strategy,’ says Risam.
Risam tries to position herself as an ‘iceberg’ within her team – avoiding the perils of too much micro-managing, while being able to jump into situations when needed. She says the expression ‘calm seas do not make great sailors’ epitomises her career so far, adding that her path to success owes much to the cliché ‘the only constant is change’ in the workplace.
‘There’s never been a dull moment. During my six years at Aviva, I had three different jobs when the business was going through a lot of change, including the largest merger in the sector in 15 years, so I’ve had the benefit of growing my career while there has been a lot of turmoil in financial services.’
Lauren Livingston
CVC CAPITAL PARTNERS
Team size: Nine
Major law firms used: Clifford Chance, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Latham & Watkins, Weil, Gotshal & Manges, White & Case
‘I am told by my mother I am dangerous when bored.’
‘I am told by my mother that I am someone who is dangerous when bored,’ warns Lauren Livingston, GC of private equity house CVC Capital Partners. ‘Luckily, we’re never bored here.’ It must be far from boring: Livingston has spent over a decade at CVC since joining in 2007, becoming GC in January 2015. She has gone from strength to strength since being named as a Rising Star in the 2014 GC Powerlist.
The CVC in-house team is certainly busy, as it services every single one of the company’s 24 global offices. Livingston insists that legal has a hand in every transaction. ‘I was at an internal senior conference last week and I realised that I had worked with everyone in that large room of people, which was lovely.’ The buyout house is attracting the right kind of talent too – highly rated Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer associate Nicholas Bond joined in 2017. Clearly it is an appealing destination for budding lawyers.
In terms of transactional highlights, Livingston picks out a minority shareholder investment in the commercial manager of the UK’s top Rugby Union league, Premiership Rugby. She describes the deal as ‘complex and exciting’ for the in-house team. It was not just headline deals keeping her busy though, as with all GCs, Livingston has had to contend with the ever-growing pressure of GDPR. Despite being a general issue, she insists it requires a specialist: ‘You can’t just throw a lawyer at it. It requires cultural considerations. The lawyer has to sit with the culture of the organisation – what kind of data do my investment officers need?’
Livingston’s performance as GC has also caught the eye of private practice, with Kem Ihenacho, co-chair of Latham & Watkins’ private equity practice observing: ‘Lauren is experienced and well respected. She has a clear understanding of what’s important for CVC as an institution and its investors, therefore how to ensure that service providers deliver to them in the right way to achieve those aims.’
One of Livingston’s strongest qualities is her passion for female empowerment, regularly speaking at conferences and panel discussions on the subject. She concludes: ‘If when I speak up and out, I help just one person realise they can achieve their ambitions, then my job is done.’
Dean Nash
MONZO BANK
Team size: Nine
Major law firms used: Hogan Lovells, Simmons & Simmons, Taylor Wessing
Monzo Bank has seen meteoric growth since being founded in 2015, having already become the UK’s most popular mobile-only bank. Perhaps it is unsurprising then that its GC, Dean Nash, has experienced a similarly rapid transformation.
Nash joined Monzo as head of legal and compliance in 2016 when it was, as he describes it, ‘a tiny little company’. Eight more lawyers and 1.4 million customers later, Nash has now taken on the titles of GC and interim chief risk officer.
‘It’s not been too bad a transition,’ Nash observes. ‘Once you get to a certain level, once you are senior enough in a particular specialism, the job is to essentially build and lead a team. The day-to-day running of risk and compliance is done by the respective heads. My role is just helping the function to grow out with more people.’
Despite playing down the shift in skills, Nash does believe it is indicative of a wider trend. ‘The rise of risk and compliance functions is a result of the regulation that requires it. There’s no regulation or law that says: “You must have a GC.”’
It has been a typically busy breakout year for Monzo. The start of 2018 saw the lifting and shifting of the bank’s current-account customers from Monzo’s beta product to the full version, something Nash describes as a ‘huge technical exercise’.
There was fundraising, over £100m in fact. A total of £85m was raised from a host of venture capital firms, while a further £20m was crowdsourced from Monzo’s customers and other investors. It reflects dizzying growth: Monzo now numbers around 500 employees and moved to a new 40,000 sq ft London headquarters in August 2018.
The growth of the company necessitates new lawyers, but how does Monzo retain that entrepreneurial start-up vibe that made it unique in the first place? Nash contends: ‘It’s the Russian dolls concept. If you are a leader and the next person you hire is quite good but not as good you, you end up getting smaller and smaller Russian dolls until you end up with people who aren’t particularly good. You have to hire someone markedly better than you and it takes a brave person to do that!’
Does that make Nash the worst lawyer at Monzo? ‘Don’t print that!’, he says. ‘There are better lawyers than me at Monzo without doubt. Obviously we’re all very good, but there are some exceptional lawyers.’
Eva Sanchez
AQR CAPITAL MANAGEMENT
Team size: Ten+
Major law firms used: Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, Simmons & Simmons
AQR Capital Management GC and head of compliance Eva Sanchez has been kept busy since joining the company five months ago.
Last November, the US hedge fund and institutional investor, which has $196bn in assets under management, broke into the Japanese market though its affiliate AQR International, establishing a team in Tokyo.
A month before AQR opened its office in Japan, it established an engineering centre in Bangalore to support the company’s trading systems and market research.
The new Tokyo office joins an office AQR opened in Hong Kong three years ago and a base it has in Sydney.
Globally, there are understood to be around 50 lawyers working for AQR, which is headquartered in Greenwich in Connecticut, but London remains a major hub for the business where Sanchez runs a team of over ten staff across the company’s compliance and regulatory affairs team.
Sanchez, who featured in the 2016 GC Powerlist, was previously GC and head of compliance for the European arm of US hedge fund Citadel for seven years, where she was described by one private practice partner as ‘operating at the cutting edge of the business’.
She was responsible for implanting all European legislation for the company’s asset management activities and quantitative market-making businesses, and was an active member of the Alternative Investment Management Association, where she sat on the board.
Before joining Citadel, she served as global head of legal for nine years at Swiss Re Capital Management and Advisory. She began her career as a finance associate at Clifford Chance in London and Milan.
Karen Kerrigan
SEEDRS
Team size: 15
Major law firms used: Fieldfisher, Penningtons Manches, Simmons & Simmons
Karen Kerrigan has been at the front line for crowdfunder Seedrs since its conception in 2012. Her three-year run as chief legal officer has taken her to new heights as chief operating officer at the company, which gives investors across Europe an online platform for investing in start-ups and later-stage businesses.
Last year saw £195m worth of investment pass through Seedrs, with German sustainable energy start-up Sono Motors raising €6.1m from over 760 investors – the largest EU-funded deal of 2018. ‘We’ve got a 65-75% success rate of raising funds for businesses, which we are pretty happy with,’ she says. ‘My role is pretty atypical and has evolved in the last couple of months to reflect my growing involvement in ensuring the sustainability of the businesses.’
GCs having involvement in operations and their companies’ growth plans is becoming increasingly common and is ‘symptomatic of the expectations that are put on lawyers’. When Kerrigan joined as legal and financial director in 2013, Seedrs employed around five people, but the legal team has since grown to 15 lawyers working across legal, financial, compliance and HR affairs.
According to the former Simmons & Simmons associate, there are compelling reasons for lawyers to work for companies in the fintech space. ‘Our business is run on contracts – you buy shares and you sell them, yes… but there are huge opportunities for lawyers at Seedrs because we’re all about finding ways of using legal technologies to streamline processes.’
The London-headquartered company was the first equity crowdfunding platform to have gained authorisation by the Financial Conduct Authority. Kerrigan is less interested in looking elsewhere for tech support for processes and has been growing the company’s own capabilities. She spends time lobbying regulatory and legislative bodies on developments, particularly in Europe, regarding crowdfunding regulation.
‘The great thing about being a GC is that you don’t always have to look at things from a legal perspective. I’ve become better at my job through the lobbying and that’s something I wouldn’t usually have done as a private practice lawyer.’
Ruwan De Soyza
WORLDPAY
Team size: 24
Major law firms used: Allen & Overy, Sidley Austin, Wiggin
When Ruwan De Soyza, deputy group GC of Worldpay, moves on later this year, the newly merged payment-processing giant will be losing a credit to the in-house profession.
De Soyza made his name as an in-house lawyer at Standard Chartered, working there at the height of the financial crisis. As a result of that harsh experience, the resident headaches of 2018, such as Brexit and GDPR, have been burdensome but manageable.
Factoring in the small matter of the world’s largest-ever merger of payment-processing companies (US-based Vantiv bought Worldpay for £9bn in 2017) and the resulting surge of integration work, even De Soyza could be excused for being flustered. ‘Brexit on its own would’ve been enough!’ he quips.
The integration, which has seen a mass-migration of people to Vantiv’s Cincinnati base, is going smoothly according to De Soyza, but he notes it is ‘touching every member of the legal team’. Aside from the logistical hurdles, De Soyza and his team had to match up with the legacy Vantiv in-house function in terms of external counsel. He was keen for the Worldpay ethos not to be lost: ‘We’ve always operated a relatively slim panel of preferred law firms. Since the merger, we have retained that methodology. In terms of billing, we expect discounts where they can apply.’
De Soyza was able to successfully argue his case – Worldpay has largely retained its roster of preferred advisers, which has historically included Allen & Overy, Sidley Austin and Wiggin. But having steadied the ship following the blockbuster combination, the new-look Worldpay will have to manage without De Soyza, who will decamp to a FTSE 100 technology company in a GC and executive committee role later this year.
His human qualities will be among the most missed. He concludes: ‘My mantra is “work hard, do well, but be nice”. Being approachable and helpful is so important.’
Rachel Wheeler
GAM
Team size: 30
Major law firms used: Allen & Overy, Clifford Chance, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Homburger, Macfarlanes
Rachel Wheeler was already regarded as one of Aviva’s leading in-house lawyers before she left for investment management company GAM in September 2018. Wheeler, who was GC for Aviva Investors under group GC Kirsty Cooper, says the move was about proving she could sit at the top of the tree.
She comments: ‘I loved my job at Aviva, but the opportunities for career growth there were a little limited. Kirsty Cooper is an inspiring GC who taught me a lot and was a great boss, but ultimately she is in charge of the legal function. I was approached about the GAM role and a couple of things jumped out at me, one of them being that the buck stops with me.’
GAM is listed in Switzerland and oversees assets worth more than $139bn. GAM has had its challenges this last year following the suspension of the investment director and business head for the unconstrained absolute return bond strategy (ARBF), and the subsequent liquidation of the ARBF funds and mandates leading to a fall in assets under management.
At GAM, Wheeler oversees a team of 30 (down from the 80 she had at Aviva), and in early 2019 introduced a new structure to the team aimed at improving consistency across the global function and unifying the team. There are lawyers in Zurich, New York, Luxembourg, Germany, Hong Kong, London and Cambridge. Wheeler has created centres of excellence that span locations. Reporting lines remain in region, but there will be additional reporting lines to support this structure.
‘The business is very positive about it. They historically had questions about who they should go to, so we’ve given colleagues clear guidelines about how they should interact with the function.’
Wheeler is looking to formalise panel arrangements this year and says she and new head of compliance, David Kemp, are working closely together to transform the control environment in GAM. ‘With two new people starting in those areas together at the same time, it gives us a great opportunity to look at things with a fresh pair of eyes. The sleeves are well and truly rolled up.’
Jenifer Swallow
TRANSFERWISE
Team size: Seven
Major law firms used: Allen & Overy, JAG Shaw Baker, Paul Hastings
At payment firm TransferWise, GC Jenifer Swallow says everyone ages in dog years: ‘There’s just always so much going on!’
Swallow was the first in-house lawyer at TransferWise when she joined in 2015 and it has since grown to four fully-qualified lawyers. Including non-legal professionals, the team now numbers seven.
Last year Swallow and her team were kept busy as TransferWise launched a variety of products and initiatives. Chiefly, the company introduced a debit card to its business customers, which gives them the cross-border benefits of the usual TransferWise transactions: namely, the ‘real’ and up-front exchange rate before engaging in international payments. And, in a fintech crossover comic book fans would be proud of, TransferWise entered into a partnership with mobile banking app Monzo. The agreement will allow Monzo Bank customers to also benefit from these cross-border discounts.
Swallow comments: ‘Why would you build cross-border functionality when we already have it and at a lower price point?’
However, the introduction of EU regulation, namely the second Payment Services Directive, is putting pressure on mainstream banks to provide greater transparency in foreign currency transactions. Barclays has already started flagging up its exchange rate. This means competition. But Swallow is unfazed.
‘That was my first question when being interviewed for this role. “What are you going to do when the banks are forced to comply?” The response has stayed with me since: “The mission is to make money move quickly and transparently for customers. If we get that done, we will have achieved our ambition.”’
Erica Handling
BLACKROCK
Team size: 60
Major law firms used: Clifford Chance, Herbert Smith Freehills, Linklaters
US-based BlackRock is the world’s largest asset management company with nearly $6trn in assets under management. EMEA GC Erica Handling joined the multinational from Barclays in 2015, in a move that showed the growing importance of asset management firms in the UK.
Handling manages a team of 60, mostly based in London but also on the ground in Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Hungary. The team shape and size is broadly the same as when she first joined, although Handling notes that as the wider firm continues to see strong growth in Europe, added headcount will inevitably follow.
Handling says her ethos is to make her lawyers as happy and fulfilled as possible – initiatives have included the introduction of flexible working and flexible time off, meaning employees at the company are no longer allocated holiday and management has the discretion to give people more freedom about taking time off.
There is also a programme that acts as a clearing system for legal and compliance, called the Talent Assignment Platform. Handling comments: ‘If you’ve got a discrete project that needs to be worked on, then you can advertise it and people can say, “Hey, I’d like to do that.” It gets people working on completely different projects and working with people in completely different locations.’
Otherwise, she says she is focused on utilising technology within the function, and has used artificial intelligence and auto-drafting tools for a MiFID II project. BlackRock runs a hackathon each year, which most recently saw the legal team use developers to produce its own version of AI and auto-drafting tools. The project made it through to the European final, with winning projects getting funded by the group.
‘The issue we have is it moves very fast, so you’ll be talking to one provider who’s the best for AI for legal docs and then six months later they’re not the best.’
Heather Mitchell
THE CARLYLE GROUP
Team size: 14
Major law firms used: Allen & Overy, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Latham & Watkins, Linklaters, Ropes & Gray
Anti-bribery and corruption regulations have been front of mind for global alternative asset manager The Carlyle Group, which has $212bn of assets under management. Global GC for investments and head of Europe, Heather Mitchell, says the London-based legal team recently pioneered a project with Ropes & Gray looking at how the private equity firm addresses anti-bribery and corruption globally.
By getting one firm to do all of this work, whether it be an oil and gas deal in Africa or a technology deal in the Philippines, Carlyle knows there will be a consistent approach to assessing risk. The group’s entire global portfolio is then assessed every six months from an anti-bribery and corruption perspective. ‘We rank all of our current and historical portfolio companies on whether they are high, medium or low risk,’ Mitchell says. ‘Some companies – given certain sectors and/or geographies – will never be a low risk, no matter what policies or efficiencies we put in place, but the goal is to not have anything high risk.’
Mitchell says Carlyle has also been rolling out more questionnaires to its portfolio companies and has implemented a new cyber security risk analysis tool. The overall objective is to improve knowledge about potential acquisitions ahead of time, rather than discovering various risks after the fact.
Her legal team is split between four lawyers in the UK, and three in each of Asia and the US, alongside a couple of trainees across the regions. The team is rolling out more training to help the legal function strike a balance between commerciality and bureaucracy. ‘We’re trying to put in practices that take bureaucracy away from the team. We need to be nimble and commercial – that’s our business.’
Linklaters partner Alex Woodward comments: ‘She is very good at managing the team across all the different investments and things they have as a house, which given the size and scale of Carlyle is no mean feat.’
Rushad Abadan
STANDARD LIFE ABERDEEN
Team size: 100
Major law firms used: Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Slaughter and May
Rushad Abadan, GC of asset management firm Standard Life Aberdeen, has earned a strong reputation for persevering when the going gets tough.
The asset management sector is under intense pressure at the moment, with markets becoming increasingly volatile due to political risk. When you add the considerable task of integrating two separate legal teams following the August 2017 merger between Standard Life and Aberdeen Asset Management, some would consider it to be a particularly stressful year.
But not for Abadan: ‘I was at The Royal Bank of Scotland in the aftermath of the financial crisis. This is a great time to be in-house in some ways, because the quality of the work is exceptional. It’s quite an interesting challenge.’
Abadan spent close to a decade at RBS, becoming deputy group GC in 2015 before leaving for Standard Life Aberdeen. Aside from the hardy nature this gave him, he has received plaudits for the way he engages with external counsel, driving value wherever possible. ‘It’s just fixed fees as much as possible. We look for value-added activities. We’re trying to be sensible and broaden relationships with a small set of firms.’
Abadan is also quick to divert the accolades: ‘Without good people you can’t do much. My own focus has changed. It’s increasingly about recruiting and retaining the best people.’
Charles Barter
BRIDGEPOINT
Team size: Four
Major law firms used: Clifford Chance, Latham & Watkins, Macfarlanes, Ropes & Gray, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, Slaughter and May, Taylor Wessing, Travers Smith
‘I try not to pretend to be the same as other people I admire because you can only be yourself.’
The well-known former Travers Smith partner Charles Barter – who helped co-found the law firm’s highly rated private equity team in 1996 – took his impressive buyout track record to Bridgepoint to become its first GC in 2008.
The position advertised by the private equity investor was too good to turn down: ‘I knew I had to take it – I just knew that having a shot at another career after nearly 25 years at Travers Smith wouldn’t come around again.’
A year before his in-house move, he led Travers when it advised Bridgepoint on its £360m capture of fashion retailer FatFace. Now, he is waiting for Bridgepoint’s latest acquisition – of Portuguese water distributor Miya – to complete, while the company crafts a 100-day business plan for the new addition.
Among several high-profile deals Barter has worked on in his 11 years at Bridgepoint, the one everybody always mentions is the sale of Pret a Manger last year to investment firm JAB, with a reported price tag of £1.5bn. ‘It was obviously amazing to buy and sell such a high-quality business and recognised brand’, but he stresses that over time his role at the company has become less deal focused, and more connected to the internal management and regulatory side of the business, as well as its fundraising activities.
‘I was on the phone on a transaction at about 11 o’clock at night recently, but that’s only because a question came up that required my input. Most of the time, I’m working on internal management and regulation – because we do a lot of M&A, we have to be really careful about sanctions and anti-bribery.’ Right now he is working on making Bridgepoint compliant with the Senior Managers and Certification Regime – regulation designed to strengthen market integrity and grow accountability in financial services.
He describes himself as ‘hands-on but not overly controlling’ in the workplace and his best advice to aspiring lawyers is to be yourself. ‘I’ve always tried not to pretend to be the same as other people who I admire because you can only be yourself – of course you can learn from them, but you really are just who you are.’
Simon Cresswell
APAX PARTNERS
Team size: Two
Major law firms used: Clifford Chance, Kirkland & Ellis, Ropes & Gray, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett
A leading City partner at a US law firm describes Apax Partners’ GC Simon Cresswell as a ‘superstar’ who runs the private equity firm’s legal arm largely single-handedly.
Cresswell has been in the role for eight years and is ‘less focused on the deals and more about protecting the franchise’, according to the partner. ‘But things get elevated to him if there’s a problem – he’s clever, committed and admirable.’ Charles Barter, GC at private equity house Bridgepoint, adds that Cresswell is ‘commercially minded and thoughtful’ in the workplace. Cresswell was executive director and senior counsel at Goldman Sachs for seven years before moving to Apax. Prior to that, he was a lawyer for Davis Polk & Wardwell and Mallesons Stephen Jaques.
London-headquartered Apax has offices in New York, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Tel Aviv, Munich and Shanghai. It was founded in 1969 and is one of the oldest private equity companies operating internationally. Apax Funds invests in companies in the technology, telecommunications, healthcare, consumer and financial sectors. In January, it took a $200m minority stake in artificial intelligence company Fractal Analytics, which is based in India and the US. Last September, it snapped up North American franchiser of home services Authority Brands from private equity investor PNC Riverarch Capital for an undisclosed sum.
The private equity house has made other noteworthy investments over the years. In 2016, it acquired German pharmaceutical company neuraxpharm Arzneimittel and three subsidiaries of Spanish pharmaceutical group Invent Farma, which helped create Neuraxpharm, a European pharmaceutical company. And in 2011, Apax bought mobile phone operator Orange Switzerland from France Telecom Orange for €1.6bn before selling the operator three years later to NJJ Capital for €2.3bn.
Cresswell is no longer running the legal arm at Apax unaided after hiring a second lawyer late last year. – a compliance team of four people report to him.