About

Ireland is a global centre of aircraft leasing, and the sector is a huge success story for the Irish economy, with it contributing around €4bn in revenue in 2016. GE Capital Aviation Services (GECAS) is the largest aircraft leasing and financing company in the world measured by size of fleet, with over 1950 aircraft worth tens of billions of dollars on their books. John Ludden is executive vice president and general counsel for this Irish-American business and is based at their Shannon Airport offices. His performance with GECAS has been rewarded by an ever-expanding portfolio, as he describes. ‘I guess the highlight of the role for me’, he says, ‘involves being given increased responsibility. Originally it was chiefly aircraft leasing, but now I am involved with some M&A activities, corporate restructuring, and we also moved 300 aircraft from the US to Ireland with various companies’. Aside from these personal highlights, Ludden has also had a major positive impact on how the GECAS legal team as a whole operates: ‘one thing that we focused on has been professional development of lawyers. To do this we revamped our professional development programme, make sure the legal team are kept up to date with occurrences in the market and tap into the global knowledge-base of the entire GECAS legal team’. Ludden believes that when providing a recommendation to the business, this should be ‘backed up by hard analysis and legal rationale’. He is adamant that this is the key factor in an in-house individual succcesfulyl adding added value to a business. ‘When you give an opinion’, he says, ‘stick to it, and be there for the commercial team as much as possible’.