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Gemma Phillips of Addleshaw Goddard: celebrating individuality
Gemma Phillips, managing associate in Addleshaw Goddard’s corporate team, speaks to Marc Mullen about the thrill she gets from completing a deal, and her focus on promoting the benefits of diversity within the business
As an argumentative child it was suggested to me that maybe I should be a lawyer. It stuck – I studied law at Durham University and liked corporate law because the focus was client aims rather than a never-ending stream of new rules and regulations. When aiming for a training contract, I concentrated on firms with a strong corporate offering and joined PwC Legal. I enjoyed helping frame the start of a new relationship, which is why corporate transactions work appealed.
I qualified in 2009, when the financial world was still reeling from the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Luckily, PwC was to some degree protected from the worst of the recession because of the range of its work. I was kept busy on a mix of restructuring and transaction work. I took a secondment to the legal team at Lehman Brothers’ European arm to settle claims from their largest creditors, including Citigroup, working alongside the PwC administrators and a litigation team from Travers Smith. It was by far the largest single deal PwC had undertaken and easily the most complex to negotiate and structure. The experience was invaluable, and seeing my deal on the Times Square news tickers was a career highlight. I then joined Travers Smith’s PE team to work at a firm with more emphasis on corporate deals.