Kate has advised and represented a large cross section of the alternative asset management community over the past 21 years, since founding Oesa in 2002. She has also been engaged as a legal and regulatory consultant by Ernst and Young, as well as by large pension funds, a well-known charitable trust, industrial corporates and proprietary trading houses, all of whom required specialist legal advice in relation to their trading and derivative documentation.
Kate qualified as a barrister but decided to pursue a career in the City as a sales and trading lawyer specialising in derivatives, prime brokerage and complex structured products. She gained invaluable experience in-house at several large financial institutions during the innovative period of the 1990’s including Daiwa Securities, Salomon Brothers (now Citi) and then Goldman Sachs, where she headed up the Prime Brokerage and the European capital markets legal teams that encompassed all the derivative trading activity for EMEA & Hong Kong.
Kate’s advice at all of these institutions was integral to the development of a vast array of new innovative financial products. In addition, she contributed to the many industry initiatives to standardise documentation and product definitions, including the ISDA Master Agreement and CSA/CSD, Master Confirmations, FOA ETD agreements, and the GMRA.
Prior to setting up Oesa, Kate was a consultant to the then FSA and was one of the original authors of the Market Abuse Code and the Wholesale Money Markets Code of Conduct.
Kate’s wealth of experience is unmatched today in the alternative asset manager space.
Ian is a professional documentation specialist with 30 years of experience. He has worked in the documentation areas of Merrill Lynch, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, where he negotiated various agreements across a range of financial products, including bank loans and underwriting facilities, MTN and EMTN facilities, foreign exchange, commodities and swaps transactions including ISDAs, amongst others.
Ian has a wealth of experience in both ISDA and bespoke product documentation and has assisted on several drafting projects undertaken by ISDA to produce industry standard documents. He has been associated with Oesa since 2007.