About

When Christina Lema joined Vista Equity Partners in 2012, it was a private equity-focused firm with two product lines, $6bn under management and employing around 50 staff, most of whom were investment professionals. Vista’s product lines now include private equity, credit, and public markets, it has over $30bn in capital commitments and employs around 200 people. In 2016 it was rated as the best-performing private equity fund over the past decade for the second year in a row by Professor Oliver Gottschalg’s HEC-Dow Jones ranking. Lema, who joined as Vista’s first general counsel, has played a significant role in the company’s journey. Advising the founders on launching a debt fund and a hedge fund was, she says, was an exciting introduction to life in-house. ‘At Vista, it was also my job to work alongside the team to build it. Getting to work on a project of that size and complexity – from start to finish – is a total change in role. It’s no longer just my job to identify risks, but also to build a path to get the job done.’ Arriving as Vista’s first general counsel gave Lema additional opportunities to be entrepreneurial. ‘The on-boarding process was more or less figuring out for myself what the legal function should look like’ she says. Recruiting the right members of her team was critical. ‘You learn rapidly how to spot the start-up mentality in new recruits,’ she adds. ‘You’re looking for the type of person who is not waiting to be given tasks, but rather constantly looks for ways to add value. That’s what a fast-growing business needs, but it’s not a mind-set shared by all lawyers.’ Lema’s role is now a varied one, and she divides her time between corporate and transactional matters, fund formation, every day legal matters, including human resources, and advising Vista’s portfolio companies, which range in size from around $50bn to over $6bn in enterprise value. She has also worked to bring the general counsel of Vista’s portfolio companies together as a community, something she considers a highlight of her time in the role. Each year, the legal teams from across Vista’s portfolio come together for a two-day seminar, and the community shares information online regularly. There are, says Lema, a number of advantages to this community building: ‘In contrast to the usual private equity approach of buying companies and operating them in silos, Vista creates a portfolio that is more than the sum of its parts. Forming a general counsel community and encouraging regular communication makes it easier for all portfolio companies to share best practices, which adds a lot of value to each company and to Vista. For example, when new laws such as the general data protection regime or a piece of EU legislation are introduced, we can make sure that all of our portfolio companies have the information and strategy they need quickly, rather than leaving it to each company to figure out independently.’