Shearman & Sterling Alumni Spotlight

Through the Alumni Spotlight series, you can meet a few of our distinguished alumni to learn how they leveraged their time at the firm to advance their careers and what advice they would give to those looking to have similar success.

Victoria Gillam Managing Director, Tikehau Capital

Victoria Gillam ’08 (European Finance, 2008–2011, London) planned to go into banking after completing an Economics degree at the historic University of Cambridge in England. A summer internship at Shearman & Sterling’s London office changed that. Gillam stayed with the firm for about four years before leaving to become Managing Associate Solicitor at multinational law firm SJ Berwin, which has since merged with Chinese/Australian-based King & Wood Mallesons. She did a short one-year stint with Reed Smith LLP before joining global asset management company Tikehau Capital, where she has worked her way up from Director/Counsel to Managing Director.

What is your favorite memory or story from your time at Shearman & Sterling?

A partner I was working for came in one Monday and said we’d been instructed to act on a big Premiership football club acquisition. He wouldn’t let on which football club it was, but as I’m a really big football fan, I made sure I pestered him and got to work on it! After some prodding, the partner finally told me Manchester City was the target, which is my team! So, as a baby lawyer, I got to work on the acquisition of Manchester City and the subsequent squeeze-out.

A colleague of mine who was running the transaction from the Shearman M&A side transitioned to be the Manchester City General Counsel after the deal was completed. The club’s new owners had wonderfully ambitious plans for Manchester City and there was a lot of legal workstreams ahead, so, given my love of Manchester City and being from Manchester, I was sent to help the General Counsel. The partner who sent me actually mentioned me recently in his retirement speech when he talked about this girl who was so excitable about football jumping up and down in the office! He said he’d never seen anyone so enthusiastic for any transaction in his life, which has to be true. I was in heaven! That has to be my favorite period at Shearman, when I got to buy football players for a living!

What skills or capabilities did you gain from your time at the firm that prepared you for future roles?

All my legal career was formed by Shearman and the people I met there. We were quite a lean outfit and didn’t have a strict structure of partners, seniors, mid-levels and juniors. You were simply put in a team and told to get cracking, but thankfully that suits my personality well. From the word go, I was working on large, complicated transactions with real stalwarts of their game who would give me as much as I could manage. It was somewhat sink or swim, but it taught me to never get stressed, ask for help and guidance when you need it and cut through noise. 

My time at Shearman fostered a real entrepreneurial spirit because I wasn’t spoon-fed. I got to think for myself rather than being told I could only handle a few deals and certain documents at once. Not being put in a box early on in my career has made me good at what I do now given the variety of deals I’m working on at any one time. I apply the same training model with my team now and ensure the juniors get to see the bigger transaction picture rather than just digestible chunks of legal documents.

What has been your career journey since leaving Shearman & Sterling?

I worked mainly on leveraged finance and capital markets transactions for Shearman. After that, I spent five years at SJ Berwin, a European law firm with a well-celebrated funds practice, so I learnt funds finance to complement my leverage practice. Thinking about partnership, I followed a mentor to Reed Smith to continue my leverage and funds finance practice; however, at that juncture, I met the General Counsel of Tikehau and decided to take on the investment lead role at Tikehau rather than pursue partnership.

Tell us about your current job. What do you enjoy most about your work?

We are headquartered in Paris and have 17 offices globally. I am the Head of Investment Legal and, therefore, cover the sourcing, execution and portfolio monitoring of our private debt, private equity, real estate and capital market strategy investments in our investment jurisdictions. There are numerous legal elements to this role but it’s also very much about execution. I ensure all the internal elements are synched so the deal can be completed as soon and as efficiently as possible. In sum, I’ve gone from doing most aspects of a few deals at my law firms to doing fewer aspects but of many more deals. This challenge of breadth versus depth of deals is that you need to very quickly understand what the deal risks are and understand what leverage we have to negotiate the risk apportionment and terms.

To illustrate, my day could start with a real estate deal in Spain, then swiftly move into a European CLO, a Dutch private credit deal and then end with a New York equity investment. Thankfully, large, cross-border deals have specific patterns and hallmarks, and once you’ve executed enough of them you are able to spot risks quickly. From my experience, when it comes to investments, you cannot circumvent experience! The variance I have now is fabulous, and I’ve really enjoyed building my team, who have all come from similar, large law firm backgrounds.

After almost seven years, I am now Managing Director, which in finance is equivalent to Partner, I guess?! That’s what I’ve told myself anyway.

What advice would you give to someone looking to have a similar career path?

Don’t go into things thinking you know what to expect. My best advice to anyone embarking on a similar career is to be curious. Go in with your eyes open and absorb as many experiences as you can find. Don’t fixate on one particular area of law or investment strategy, as your skills may well be better suited to something you’ve not contemplated before you start. Be curious and see where you end up!

I think it’s really important to have mentors at every level. I’ve certainly been strengthened by the invaluable mentors and role models who have shaped me along the way. Though sadly women, particularly at the senior level, were somewhat thin on the ground in leverage finance 15+ years ago when I started. Tikehau is really the first place where I have had female role models and I take my role as a mentor incredibly seriously. Simply, I want to do my bit in ensuring that the next generation of women in finance have more females in senior positions than my generation had, and they don’t witness some of the things that I experienced as a young female lawyer coming up.

I’d also flag to anyone looking to pursue a career in finance that racial and socio-economic diversity in finance is key too. I’m from a fairly typical working-class background and I think the UK is unfortunately still incredibly classist, with the City of London being renowned for its ‘old boys’ and ‘public school alum’ networks. At Cambridge I was rather naively propelled into a world of privilege and opportunity that I had no grounding in. I was a clever state school kid who was good at sports but felt intimidated by my new surroundings. Though I quickly acclimatized, made a bunch of friends and figured that I’d done just as well as peers who’d been through far more privileged and often spoon-fed systems to get there. That gave me all the confidence to know I was where I was meant to be, and I had the exact same spirit when I landed in the City at Shearman!