Many in-house counsel will say that the attraction of the job comes from having greater influence on their business and this is also true for Alice Marsden, group general counsel of Thomas Cook Group. However, the real draw for her comes from sometimes getting to have an altogether more personal impact.
Catherine McGregor: Lawyers get very focused on their professional qualifications, but as they rise through the ranks – particularly to the general counsel position – their role becomes increasingly focused on management. A common concern we hear is that they feel ill-equipped to deal with this shift. There can also be a desire not to …
‘The fantastic, wonderful part about being in-house is working with massively stimulating people. There’s this misconception that you outsource talent. You don’t.’ So says Piers Le Marchant, chief compliance officer for corporate and investment banking at JPMorgan Chase & Co.
‘I would never have taken a role where I wasn’t sitting at the top table. I make sure I have influence in how a firm goes about things,’ notes veteran litigator Margaret Cole, PwC’s UK general counsel and chief risk officer.
‘It was ambition that made me decide to leave Barclays,’ declares self-confessed deal junkie Michael Shaw, who resigned from his role as the bank’s deputy general counsel in the summer of 2015. Shaw was eager to pursue a weightier leadership role after six years serving as the ‘apprentice’. Bob Hoyt had succeeded Mark Harding as …
Continue reading “Profile: Michael Shaw, The Royal Bank of Scotland”
It was third time lucky when IHL finally managed to catch up with The Economist Newspaper’s general counsel and company secretary, Oscar Grut. The GC offered a stream of apologies on IHL’s arrival at his Canary Wharf office, explaining that he had been busy selling off the company’s London headquarters in St James’s. The sale …
When asked what keeps him in-house, Nokia’s Richard Vary touts two key selling points of the job: travel and adrenaline. 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 …
Last month, Pearson’s high-profile senior vice president and general counsel Bjarne Tellmann was attending an executive leadership course at Harvard Law School when he bumped into Ben Heineman, General Electric Company (GE)’s former veteran legal head who is lauded by many for inventing the playbook for the sophisticated, globe-trotting GC. Tellmann grabbed the opportunity to …
As BG Group general counsel, 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.
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 …