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In-house perspective
Deirdre Stanley:
Thomson Reuters
Pamela Hamer-Koh takes a look at the career of executive vice president and general counsel of Thomson Reuters, Deirdre Stanley
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“For a technology-delivered information company, whether it’s patenting, protecting our work or defending the right to use intellectual property, all those are really important things to us here” Deirdre Stanley
Thomson Reuters
►►Quick facts: Thomson Reuters legal department structure • 100 in-house lawyers globally • Most lawyers divided into either ‘Markets Division’ or ‘Professional Division’ • Additional practice specialist groups are leveraged across the whole corporation and include general, corporate and securities, intellectual property, employment law, global compliance
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n a tip of the hat to female muscle, Deirdre Stanley smashed through every glass ceiling and found herself mentoring young girls at the 12th ‘Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit 2010’ held in October. Stanley is Thomson Reuters’ executive vice president and general counsel and said in her summit speech: “we at Thomson Reuters believe the right information in the right hands can lead to amazing things.” One would hardly find her emphasis on acquiring timely, appropriate information surprising when one considers her role with a multinational corporation specialising in providing market and business intelligence delivery. Since the 2008 acquisition of Reuters by Thomson, the company has gone on an aggressive acquisition trail, acquiring amongst others Streamlogics (global provider of results-driven webcasting solutions) in July 2009; Vhayu Technologies (tick data service provider) in August 2009; Hugin Group (news wire service provider) in September 2009; Aegisoft, a US-based provider of electronic trading and testing tools, in February 2010; and Revista dos Tribunals, a leading legal publisher in Brazil, in May 2010. “For a company like us that is in the information business, there’s always somebody out there, no matter how innovative we try to be, who has figured out some other thing that a professional needs,” Stanley said.
The merged company
Thomson Reuters has 55,000 employees in over 100 countries and a 100-strong legal department globally, with five in-house lawyers based in Asia. Head-hunted by Thomson in 2002, Stanley presided over the gruelling 18 month-long integration
of Thomson and Reuters, and became general counsel of the combined entity when the transaction closed in 2008. According to Stanley, the complexity of the deal surrounds Thomson, a Canadian company, acquiring a UK company with the business objective to retain as much of the UK shareholder base as possible. “It was a very complex transaction. Beyond having listings in Toronto, the NYSE, NASDAQ and the London Stock Exchange, we actually had companies that were integrated but under two separate companies in Canada and the UK,” she said. Months after the deal closed, Thomson Reuters discovered that North American investors showed far stronger interest in the stock compared to their UK counterparts, prompting a second round of changes. “It was almost like we did two transactions about 18 months apart,” says Stanley. “It became clear that the North American investor was more interested in the stock, so having that structure really created a problem because there was a great disparity in the stock prices between what was going on in the UK and North America. So we had to simplify the structure.” In the second round of changes, Stanley and her legal team unified the company’s dual listed structure and withdrew its listing on the London Stock Exchange and NASDAQ, meaning the company was listed only on the New York and Toronto Stock Exchanges. In addition, Stanley supervised the integration of products, sales forces, and the growth of market strategy across multiple jurisdictions. “A lot of the integration was really between one particular area of our business which we market around financial information. We had 11 months between signing and closing the deal to do integration planning Asian Legal Business ISSUE 10.12