About

Richard O’Sullivan started as general counsel of Global Shares in January 2017 with a brief to re-build and modernise the legal and compliance team in this rapidly growing business. He started out his career as a corporate lawyer with one of the large Dublin firms working on major domestic and international M&A transactions and made the move into an in-house role with a major global pharmaceutical company at a time when that was considered career suicide. He highlights that, he ‘was aware of a growing trend in the UK for companies to grow their in-house legal functions and I knew Ireland would follow that trend. During my time in pharma, I realised that the future was not only in-house, but that regulatory law was growing across most industry sectors. There is always more regulation, never less’. He decided to sharpen his regulatory skills in private practice for a few years before making the move in-house again to set up the legal department in a new Irish regulator, HIQA, and during that time, started a Masters degree in regulatory law, which he completed last year. In his current role as general counsel of Global Shares he heads a global legal function, with offices in Cork, London, New York, Beijing and Tokyo as well as operations in Lisbon, Edinburgh, Nashville and Japan. When he started, the legal team consisted of one lawyer who had subsequently decided to move on. By that stage, the company was already operating in multiple jurisdictions and had a captive in-house MiFID investment firm. O’Sullivan took on six roles: general counsel, group company secretary, head of compliance, MLRO, DPO and head of risk. He has since completely revamped the legal team in global shares. Under his watch the team has successfully obtained a US broker-dealer financial services licence, a second MiFID Financial Services licence and are in the process of applying for more financial services licenses. It has more than doubled in size, have grown into the US and Asia and have resolved many historic issues which had been carried from the early days. He has also harnessed technology to really focus on efficiency and getting the best management information from its systems. He highlights that ‘we use Jira, Trello and SmartSheets daily in the legal team. The legal team under my watch is now well placed to support expected exponential growth in our new markets’. He has also led the firm through several regulatory improvement projects, hand-in-hand with key regulators and introduced automated AML KYC screening using the latest mobile app software and international databases. On his success and his team’s ability to grow, O’Sullivan highlights that, ‘being in a very heavily regulated industry and growing at an exponential rate each year is usually a recipe for trouble but we have managed all the risks through a combination of careful risk assessment, use of technology and building excellent business relationships across the company and across all our global locations’.