Client profile: Oscar Grut, The Economist

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The international news outlet’s long-serving GC discusses the company’s buy-back move and its digital ventures

It was third time lucky when Legal Business finally managed to catch up with The Economist Newspaper’s general counsel (GC) and company secretary, Oscar Grut. The GC offered a stream of apologies on this reporter’s arrival in his Canary Wharf office, explaining that he had been busy selling off the company’s London headquarters in St James’s.

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Life During Law: Stephen Paget-Brown, Travers Smith

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My career couldn’t be better. Nice work, nice clients, good money… The culture of this firm lends itself to being an enjoyable place to work. We don’t have the bureaucracy or warfare other firms have.

I started at Clifford Turner. Matthew Layton was still in shorts. The head of commercial litigation in the early 1980s was a South African called Leon Boshoff – very tall, powerfully built… Behind that fearsome appearance he had a razor-sharp mind. One of the cases involved Lloyd’s of London. He took them on four square. He taught us to be fearless and not judge a situation by: ‘Well, this is a reputable institution, they can’t have done anything wrong.’ Drill down. Find the evidence. Form your own judgement.

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GC Perspectives – Philip Bramwell, BAE Systems

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I’m of an age where I form part of a group of lawyers who elected to pursue careers in-house from the outside. I had failed to complete a chemical engineering course so I had a very clear purpose in studying law: I wanted to work in-house. I identified a couple of industries I thought should grow so I might surf that wave.

I started out in pharma in the late ‘70s, which was immensely enjoyable. I grew a love of complex businesses – global, multinational businesses. They provide rich opportunities for lawyers in a variety of areas – commercial, corporate, M&A. That is the theme I followed throughout my career.

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‘This is a gritty place’: Macfarlanes’ leaders on the hustle it takes to look effortless

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Victoria Young talks to the singular City player about success and bucking the market

‘Strong culture’, ‘high quality’ and ‘entrepreneurial’ are phrases repeatedly associated with Macfarlanes among peers and former staff. And its recently re-elected executive has no desire to debunk the image of a hard-nosed, competitive shop.

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Life During Law: Chris Saul, Slaughter and May

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Every time my father got a promotion we had to move. It trains you to fit in with new crowds. He worked for the Midland Bank. We lived in Carlisle, Shropshire, Birmingham, Kingston-upon-Thames and Manchester. It focused me on academic work as each new school had a different syllabus so I was always catching up.

I used to stand in our garage handing my father spanners. My favourite car in my youth was the Lancia Aurelia B20 GT, which was one of the classic Pininfarina designs of the ’50s. They were the embodiment of high-quality engineering. I went through a severe Lancia-buying phase in my 20s. I bought five!

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Client profile: Richard Vary, Nokia

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The comms and IT multinational’s litigation head on the takeover of Alcatel-Lucent and its tax battle with India

When asked what keeps him in-house, Nokia’s Richard Vary is quick to tout travel and the adrenaline as two top selling points of the job. His role as head of litigation has placed him in some interesting scenarios over his ten years working for the multinational communications and IT company. ‘It was my birthday last year when I arrived at work and then discovered we had a hearing in India the next day,’ Vary told Legal Business. ‘So my 43rd birthday consisted of buying a shirt and a pair of pants, and jumping on the next British Airways flight to Delhi, sitting there in 40° heat in this packed, humid courtroom in a woollen suit, trying to follow the details in a tax case in the most run-down, awful building. There were chickens and goats outside the door of this courtroom, and some guy asleep on the floor in the back row, just fast asleep, lying on the concrete floor in the middle of a trial. It was very odd.’

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Client profile: Tom Melbye Eide, Royal Dutch Shell

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The energy group’s upstream legal chief discusses general counsel’s role as a risk partner and that £47bn deal

As BG Group general counsel (GC), and now executive vice president and GC for Royal Dutch Shell’s upstream business, Tom Melbye Eide has an enviable addition to his CV, considering his lead role in BG’s £47bn acquisition by Shell, the world’s second-biggest energy deal on record, which completed last month. Continue reading “Client profile: Tom Melbye Eide, Royal Dutch Shell”

Life During Law: Monty Raphael QC

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My parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe. My father came after being conscripted against his will in the Tsarist army and took a tortuous route via Germany and Paris. My mother came from Russian-occupied Poland. We lived in Stepney and my father waited for people to die and sold their clothes in Petticoat Lane market.

Before pop stars all we had were film stars. But there were glamorous lawyers like Hartley Shawcross, whose face was always in the newspapers as he was a prosecutor in the Nuremberg war trials. I’d never met a lawyer. It was a fantasy.

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Client profile: John Tribolati, JPMorgan Chase

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The investment bank’s EMEA GC on tackling the growth of global regulation and avoiding potholes along the way.

There’s a school of thought that says ‘never go back’ to a former lover or job. But having spent eight years at JPMorgan Chase & Co in the 1990s, a phone call from the investment bank’s ‘very persuasive’ general counsel (GC) Stacey Friedman in 2015 made John Tribolati’s decision to return to his old shop very easy. ‘It was an opportunity to have my own gig,’ he says.

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