Corporate finance
Corporate finance lawyers advise clients on all aspects of the buying and selling of interests in businesses or business assets, relationships with their shareholders, corporate governance and equity financing matters. This includes advising on compliance with company law procedures, the raising of equity financing and, in the case of cross-border transactions, compliance with domestic and foreign laws. It is possible to work primarily on mergers and acquisitions (M&A) with public or privately owned companies. Alternatively, a corporate lawyer may focus on equity capital markets work, the private equity, venture capital or hedge fund sectors, or spend their whole career as a generalist assisting SMEs and small-scale entrepreneurs. The choice between a career as a barrister and solicitor is the classic fork in the path that all wannabe lawyers must face. However, for David Griffith-Jones – a corporate finance solicitor at Sullivan & Cromwell – it was not a decision that cost him too many sleepless nights. “A piece of advice I was given was: what are the core skills that you want to develop while doing this job?” he recalls. “Do those core skills lead you in the direction you want to go?” Accordingly, he weighed up the key competencies necessary for each profession. “As a junior barrister you are mostly looking at civil procedural rules, the evidential side – it’s very tactical, very procedural,” he reports. “However, as a junior corporate solicitor I spend more time getting to learn what businesses want and also why they want to pursue these goals.” The chance to work for some of the most powerful forces in the business world was irresistible – it was the solicitor route for Griffith-Jones, more particularly corporate finance. His fascination with what makes businesses – and the people behind them – tick was cemented during his training contract at Sullivan & Cromwell, when
he was seconded to a private-equity firm in Silicon Valley on the world famous Sand Hill Road, an experience he describes as the highlight of his career so far. “To understand this place was a fantastic opportunity – the buildings may look unassuming but inside them are the people coming up with the businesses of tomorrow. It was a real opportunity to see how people use legal providers and what clients look for in their lawyers.” The client is king After his training contract, Griffith-Jones qualified into Sullivan & Cromwell’s general practice group – a deliberately broad area that eschews the narrow silos common to many law firms. The group is an unusual (although not unique) way of structuring the corporate side and is responsible for everything from capital markets and M&A to commercial real estate, to project financing transactions. “We don’t draw as many distinctions between different transactional practice areas as other firms,” Griffith-Jones confirms. “S&C’s view is that our lawyers can become more rounded business lawyers by understanding that these distinctions are sometimes artificial when viewed from the client’s perspective.” He appreciates that developing a more focused practice in a specific area gives young lawyers exposure to high numbers of transactions of a similar type early in their career, which can in turn promote a very deep and nuanced understanding of such transactions. The flip side is that working in a large and varied department allows for a lot of cross pollination and sharing of ideas between practice areas that might otherwise remain totally separate. ‘Corporate law’ is itself a nebulous area of practice. Whereas a financing lawyer will advise on the debt in a business, throughout the capital structure, corporate lawyers are principally focused on the equity financing of funds and businesses and how that equity interacts with the other rights of shareholders
For more firms that work in this practice area, please use the “Training contract regional indexes” starting on p205.
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