The background

Twenty years inside international law firms. Now working independently with the people navigating them

I spent two decades at Hogan Lovells, White & Case and Dechert working across Singapore, New York and London, with responsibility for teams and operations spanning twelve countries and fourteen offices.

I built HR functions from scratch. I opened offices. I reported into head offices in Philadelphia and New York while running European and Asian operations from the outside. And I worked closely enough with Business Services Directors across those firms and geographies to understand, form the inside, what separates those who build genuine influence at partnership level from those who don’t.

That experience is the foundation of the advisory work I do now.

What I observed - and what it led to

Across those twenty years a pattern repeated itself often enough to take seriously.

Business Services Directors who were operationally excellent, delivering consistently, trusted by their teams, well regarded by their peers, could still find themselves invisible to partners and firm leadership whose opinion ultimately determined what happened in their careers.

Not because they were doing anything wrong. But because influence in a partnership environment works differently to influence anywhere else. It is not accumulated through performance alone. It is built through the right relationships, in the right rooms, over time and most BSDs are never told how. I also observed the reverse. Directors who understood this who mapped their stakeholders deliberately, who engineered their visibility rather than waiting to be noticed, who navigated the specific complexity of cross-border and matrix structures with intention moved forward in ways that their peers, often more technically accomplished, did not.

That gap is what The BSD Senior Advisory exists to close.