Interim Group Chief Legal Officer — Renewal (Asset Management)

Not a corporate housekeeping exercise

Entity governance is easy to mistake for housekeeping: board minutes in order, registers up to date, directors appointed on time. All of that matters, and none of it is the point here. The point is that each legal entity's formal authority should match where decisions about it are really taken. When the entity board approves what the group has already decided, or the group decides what only the entity may lawfully decide, the gap is a liability for the directors who sign and for the business that relies on the signature. This appointment is about closing that gap, not tidying around it.

Making formal authority tell the truth

You will hold executive authority. That authority lets you write the rules for entity governance decisions, decide what local managers may approve themselves, and select the measures that steer spending, people and control. Each commitment is kept, held or ended on your decision, and you will stop any plan that pushes cost or risk onto nobody in particular. Investment cases that leave out the change's adopters, what it hangs on and what it costs if it goes wrong will be declined. Who leads what in the legal function, and how problems are raised, will be for you to approve, and when the Regional President and the managers running the business disagree, you will settle it before money is committed.

The work is detailed and sometimes uncomfortable. It means asking senior people whether they really took a decision their title says they took, and redrawing delegations so that the honest answer is also the lawful one. In an investment business with funds, management companies and service entities often sitting side by side, the fiduciary dimension raises the stakes: some decisions must sit with a particular entity, whatever the group's preference.

A lawyer who has restructured authority before

You understand funds and asset management through calls that were yours alone, one of them a commitment with no case behind it that you ended before the damage showed. You have kept an investment, distribution and fiduciary platform running through a transfer of authority, and you have declined to fund work that could not name its adopters or its downside, before rebuilding the legal capacity it truly needed. You have done this in organisations with at least 700 people, three countries and revenue of $575 million or more. Selection will look at restructuring, professionalisation and buy-side M&A, and at governance ethics to level 4, with board and stakeholder management, transaction legal, and disputes and investigations to level 3. If you would keep a legal commitment running until each national head agreed to stop it, or want the influence without 12 months of accountability, the seat is not yours.

The year, and the conversations that lead to it

The first ninety days should compare the entity governance map with real decision ownership and agree with the Regional President the mismatches and who will resolve each. Around month nine, entity mandates and delegations should have been revised so that formal authority matches where decisions are made. By month 12, entity governance should be aligned with real decision ownership, with remaining exceptions owned and reported to the board.

Selection begins when the Regional President calls you, privately and on video, during the first week. Week three is with the Risk Committee Chair, testing how you would redraw delegations; week five puts you, in person, in front of executives from each of the firm's functions; and the seventh week closes with the full board. Expect a reply within four working days of each stage.