About

Markus Federle places his decision to make the transition to in-house legal work as among his career highlights. Indeed, it was a momentous decision to leave behind a hugely successful private practice career (one that saw him make partner at Norton Rose and Dewey Ballantine at an early age, as well as head of private equity for Germany at the latter) for a start-up investment management firm. As to why he made this move, Federle maintains that ‘it is perhaps part of my personality that I have this entrepreneurial drive… making the switch from being a lawyer at a global firm to being an entrepreneur was a big one, but one through which I felt I was answering a true calling’. At the start-up firm Federle and his partners quickly made excellent progress, raising and investing over $500m in two funds until the financial crisis forced the firm’s expansion to be checked, a period that Federle recalls as an important confirmation of the relevance of his role as a lawyer: ‘Lawyers are notorious for always thinking in terms of worst case scenarios, and this was an example of one happening. There are a lot of smart people in the investment world, but ultimately you cannot outsmart radical market events; as a lawyer and as a business owner this made me a little more humble, skeptical and careful and has made legal protection in downside scenarios a continued focus of my work’. After spending over four years with The Fairsky Group, the alternative investment advisory firm he had previously co-founded, Federle missed ‘the transactional side of things’ and in May 2013 joined the principal investment group Samena Capital as a senior managing director in Dubai from where he advises on investment activities throughout Asia and oversees legal and compliance in the firm’s other offices in London, Mumbai and Hong Kong. Moving to the Middle East is another career highlight of his, particularly the fact that ‘successfully adapting to new jurisdictions that have completely different cultures is a must’. For instance, he explains that he ‘just worked on a transaction in Myanmar, one of the first significant private equity deals there… but that’s the exciting thing about the job: there is always something new to learn and new people that you come across’. As a GC, Federle is adamant that while it is ‘important to be cordial and able to deal with people’, it is just as important to ‘speak up and raise any concerns for the business you may have: you have to be courageous enough to do so… identifying, measuring and managing legal risks is the very core of the role’.