THE TEAM

The Tactical Opportunities (TO) team for whom our resource Cristina worked at Linklaters was an origination unit whose focus was to “convert industry shifts and market dislocations into new business” for the clients of Linklaters’ lawyers.
Therefore, the highly valuable impact of this team was to generate sale leads for the law firm, which were then employed to look after the commercial contracts to close the TO team’s proposals for new acquisition deals. 

The TO team worked closely with Linklaters’ partners, associates and the business services teams, especially the Business Intelligence department, which provided Bloomberg data mining according to the TO team requests, in order to carry out the following operations:

- Identify market catalysts, trends and themes which could unlock value to Linklater’s clients
- Engage with Linklater’s clients, external advisers, and partners to provide a flow of highly targeted market intelligence 
- Execute initiatives to increase the Firm’s market profile and inorganic expansion pursuits

The various investment revenue streams that were proposed to the Firm’s clients included: the ECB's Asset Quality Review to scoop assets with highest value; NPL disposals to help the law firm’s clients to select the most convenient bad loans to acquire; high yield fixed income securities analysis; hedge fund activism impact and its generated opportunities.

PROJECT 1

The first project Cristina supported in the role of analyst was an assessment of distressed companies in the Oil & Gas sector, to valuate their assets, in order to propose to the law firm’s clients what to target for acquisition. The process involved at first data mining from Annual Returns in order to build a database, adding data to those extracted from Bloomberg by the business intelligence team. During this stage our resource added value by proposing additional error-checking formulas to assure the accuracy of the excel database. The project involved also the evaluation of the various distressed companies' assets: to do this, our resource helped by defining formulas to evaluate and identify the most extraction rich Basins and Reserves owned by the distressed O&G companies, shortlisted through an analysis of data sourced from DebtWire intelligence. The proposed formulas also separated the value about the concentration of Crude Oil from the value about the presence of LNG (Liquid Natural Gas) and GTL (Gas to Liquid) and focused especially on the fields where gas extraction was through fracking (hydraulic fracturing) as these operations made the gas not financially profitable at a time of crushed oil prices. Uncertainty with regard to OPEC moves and Iranian possible sanctions lifting were also considered for their impact on prices. Regression analysis was performed in some cases in which the dataset was incomplete. Our resource also compiled good slide decks that her senior colleagues used for their interactions with the law Firm's clients.


PROJECT 2

The law firm’s M&A pursuit with another US major law firm was analysed once the team identified this as an opportunity to enter new markets and expand its customer and product portfolio through acquisition, in alignment with the organisation's goals. Our resource Cristina contributed with research and analysis of M&A trends and law firms' engagement in M&A globally, to highlight the markets with the most valuable opportunities for the Firm in terms of M&A future contracts for its lawyers, leveraging the right opportunities.
Our resource used mostly data from Merger Markets and Thompson Reuters and analysed and visualised the findings on Excel and Think Cell, and presenting them on PowerPoint client decks.


PROJECT 3

When the Greek government was at high risk of bankruptcy, Cristina was asked to conduct a research and analysis about possible valuable assets to acquire from indebted Greek private companies, to advise the law firm clients about their purchase. The proposal of the identified assets with lower prices of acquisition and higher quality for value was meant to help not only the Linklaters' clients, but also the financially distressed sellers, allowing them to raise new equity to invest in a turnaround recovery.

PPROJECT 4

Cristina was also tasked with some research and analysis on several Italian banks about what they were doing in terms of regulatory capitalisation. She sourced the data mostly from Annual Reports in the Italian language and analysed which banks were behind in this endeavour, as her team aimed to target them for a sale proposal of the law firm services to help them to comply.