About

Michael Rowles, executive vice president, general counsel and secretary of Live Nation Entertainment, a market leading live music organisation and online ticketing platform, has extensive experience in building a company legal department from scratch. When he was hired as Live Nation’s first general counsel, the company had just been spun off from Clear Channel Communications and the legal function had been almost entirely broken up. He identifies that ‘having the opportunity to hand-pick my team, and to methodically assemble the various key pieces functions varying from intellectual property, to M&A, to privacy, has really been critical to our overall success’. A major highlight in Rowles’ career at Live Nation has been the merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster. An extraordinarily challenging transaction from both regulatory and governance perspectives, the merger has truly been transformative for the company and has been a key element in its “flywheel” strategy. He says, ‘as a lawyer, I had the opportunity to be involved in some of the more high-profile aspects of the deal such as navigating the regulatory review process, but also to get down into the nitty-gritty in terms of integrating two very different corporate cultures, as well as merging the two existing legal departments. We came out the other side and are much stronger for it overall’. Rowles has deliberately structured the legal department to be decentralised, which mirrors the company’s overall corporate structure and philosophy. While it has a small corporate legal group that handles securities and M&A and a few other centralised functions, the vast majority of the company attorneys report within their divisions and are accountable directly to the heads of each individual business. Rowles adds that ‘as a result, I think our lawyers are not only more responsive, they are also highly practical and business-minded and help to facilitate the great work that is being done all across the globe’.