Career Biography

James Kerton is Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Company Secretary at Convatec Group Plc – a FTSE 100 global medical products and technologies company focused on solutions for the management of chronic conditions, with leading positions in Advanced Wound Care, Ostomy Care, Continence Care and Infusion Care. With more than 10,000 colleagues, Convatec provides products and services in around 90 countries, united by a promise to be forever caring. Kerton joined Convatec and its Executive Leadership Team (CELT) on 7 May 2024, having previously been Vice President, Deputy General Counsel at Convatec between 2021-22.

Kerton has built an agile and accountable leadership team across his functional responsibilities for Legal, Intellectual Property, Ethics and Compliance, Data Privacy and the Company Secretariat. He has focused on insourcing key expertise and on business partnering, while driving increased team engagement and establishing key capabilities, including a global legal operations platform and in-house strategic legal support for key initiatives.

Professionally, Kerton has an exceptional track record in setting legal strategy and leading highly connected, collaborative and inclusive teams, and effectively partnering leadership teams in regulated entities. He has strong boardroom and executive committee experience in large FTSE-listed businesses, and has led significant public and private M&A, strategic development and change, as well as having excellent corporate governance expertise in listed and private companies.

Career history

Kerton was General Counsel and Company Secretary, and a member of the Executive Committee, at Zipup plc, a FTSE 250-listed leading provider of differentiated mobility solutions across the vehicle lifecycle. In this role, he had group-wide accountability for legal, governance and company secretariat, compliance, data privacy, insurance and security matters, and built highly regarded teams across these functions.

Between 2010 and 2021, Kerton was Managing Director, Legal – Corporate Transactions, and a member of the group leadership team, at LSEG plc, a leading global financial infrastructure and data provider, where Kerton and his team advised on M&A, corporate, finance and anti-trust matters across the LSEG group. Kerton was legal lead on LSEG’s corporate transactions, including high profile public and private M&A and capital markets transactions, and built an outstanding global M&A and antitrust legal team during his tenure. In particular, LSEG won The Lawyer Awards “In-House Banking & Financial Services Team of the Year” 2020 for its $27bn all-share acquisition of Refinitiv and related disposal of Borsa Italiana, and was shortlisted in 2018 for the same awards for its complex and innovative acquisition of The Yieldbook and Citi’s Fixed Income Indices in 2017. James was named in Financial News’s 40 under 40 Rising Stars in Legal Services 2014.

Previously, Kerton was an Associate at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP where he advised on UK and cross border M&A and equity capital markets transactions in financial services, energy and other sectors. James is a graduate of Peterhouse, University of Cambridge and BPP University Law School, London, and is qualified as a solicitor in England and Wales.