Bobby Ladwa – GC Powerlist
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China and Hong Kong 2017

Financials

Bobby Ladwa

Director of banking legal | Barclays, Hong Kong

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China and Hong Kong 2017

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Bobby Ladwa

Director of banking legal | Barclays, Hong Kong

About

Bobby Ladwa began his legal career at Clifford Chance in London, spending 12 years in the firm’s capital markets practice. Through various secondments in Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai Ladwa developed an interest in in-house work and ‘knew [he] could add value’ to a legal team. He got the chance to put his belief to the test when he was offered a position with Barclays’ recently formed Hong Kong in-house capital markets legal team. This, Ladwa says, was an opportunity for him to show his versatility and ‘adapt to changes both within Barclays globally and regionally, as well as macroeconomic changes in the market, in the climate of a rapidly evolving regulatory landscape within Asia Pacific and globally’. The Barclays Hong Kong team continued to grow ‘from being a debt capital markets [DCM] powerhouse to working on equity capital markets [ECM], M&A and other areas’. Ladwa is proud of his accomplishments, pointing in particular to applying his skills as a UK and Hong Kong dual-qualified lawyer to drive legal businesses forward through major periods of change, and achieving a personal goal by operating successfully at the highest level of the capital markets profession. The variety of legal work Ladwa has experienced, having spent considerable time in both private practice and in-house roles in diverse jurisdictions around the world, is something that he is immensely grateful for: ‘If I had stayed in London I would be a different type of lawyer’, says Ladwa. The capital markets team at Barclays is compact but highly skilled, with each team member possessing a large amount of knowledge on the jurisdictions in which the bank operates. This is especially important for Ladwa, who points to the massively expanded regulatory framework in Hong Kong and Asia Pacific as evidence that ‘managing change is essential’ in a legal team. In business terms, he adds, Asia is ‘no longer [as] laissez-faire’ as it is often assumed to be; in certain respects Asian legal practices and developments are leading the way globally. Ladwa also believes that the effective use of technology ‘unchain[s] lawyers from desks’, which is a boon for team morale and helps with staff retention, further bolstering organisational productivity and colleague engagement.

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