I actually started practising law in California, way back in the dark ages. I moved over here for two years, and I’ve been here ever since. I never really intended to be a lawyer in London at all. My lifetime ambition was to be a criminal lawyer in Baltimore. My early career could be characterised as wanting to work at a big law firm in a big city before I would go back to a smaller city and a very different law practice. As you can see, all that planning never really turned out. I haven’t touched a criminal case in a very long time.
I joined Morrison Foerster over four years ago because I was aware of a number of changes in the market. One of the changes was that the whole world of tech was for 50 years an equity story. The tech industry did not really look to the debt markets, it looked to equity rounds. What changed was that people were delaying IPO-ing so all of a sudden you had these very large private tech and IP companies, which we now call unicorns. These companies had matured, and they needed debt finance.
