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Forum Speaker


Spotlight: David Willbe, Crowell & Moring


By Kelly Dolan


David Willbe is a counsel in the London office of international law firm Crowell & Moring. He is a regular contributor to the Magazine, and will be speaking at the EC Forum on 30th September. We caught up with him to find out about his practice, and why he is a regular attendee at our Forum.


Tell us a bit about your role. I’m a corporate lawyer, so I work on company contracts – anything from a simple commercial agreement all the way up to a major joint venture, sale or listing. I focus on the venture and growth spaces, where I advise investors, funds and companies. My particular interest


is in technology,


from biotech to online and everything in between.


Why is that your focus? I’m the black sheep in a family of scientists; I grew up with science and technology from a young age, and it’s always been interesting to me. Some of my earlier memories are copy-typing adventure games from magazines into my family’s ZX Spectrum, and learning from that how to write simple games in BASIC. These days a bit of HTML is about my limit, but the general interest in technology is something that has always stayed with me! Whether or not I was working in the sector, I would always be following the news to see what was coming next.


14 entrepreneurcountry And you’ve been able to push


your career into that sector? Well – most of it, anyway! As a corporate lawyer you’re always a bit of a generalist, but the majority of my time is spent with investors and companies that are heavily tech-focused. I’ve been quite lucky though, in that when I was a junior lawyer and had to take what I was given a lot of it happened to fall into the tech sector. The first day of my career, in fact, I spent working on some (admittedly very minor!) parts of the Worldcom restructuring.


You’ll be speaking at the EC


Forum on 30th September… Yes, I’m definitely hoping to be there! This will be the fifth Forum for me – my first was in September 2011. My colleague Tim Leeson, who I work with in our venture practice, has been to all of them I think.


So what’s kept you coming back


for two years? I find the Forums to be a great opportunity to


meet entrepreneurs


informally. They’re not there looking for lawyers, so I don’t need to give them the pitch! I can have a chat with them about their business and what things they’re worried about, what opportunities they see, how they feel about the funding process and so on. This helps me to stay current with what’s going on in the sector, beyond the deals that I’m involved with.


Does staying current on issues that entrepreneurs face make much of a difference to you


though? Absolutely. Lawyers don’t just sit in a room of dusty books and give rambling pronouncements on the intricacies of the law, other than maybe some of the tax specialists! Our job is to advise our clients on how to get their deals done and although we’re bound by confidentiality, we regularly work with investors and funds as well as with founders – so we have an insight into both sides of the VC space, and we can use that to advise our clients. We’ve also done transactions at every stage and at every size – I’ve worked on the sale of Last.FM, for example, and on six-figure angel investments.


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