About

Jeremy Stevenson commenced as the first general counsel of CHAMP Private Equity (CHAMP) in July 2016 to oversee all legal affairs for the group and its investee companies with a focus on transactions, risk management and governance. CHAMP is one of Australia’s most experienced private equity management companies having first raised institutional capital more than 30 years ago. Since that time CHAMP has made more than 90 investments and deployed more than US$3.5bn in equity capital.

CHAMP has one of the largest dedicated investment teams in the region and is currently investing the CHAMP IV Funds and currently has 11 investee companies. Stevenson qualified as a lawyer in 1997 in New South Wales, South Africa and the UK and has broad legal experience gained working in a corporate environment in the wine and finance industries and for leading law firms in Australia and the UK. During his time at Accolade Wines, initially as a contractor to lead the CHAMP acquisition and design a global legal function, then as general counsel, he assumed a role that took in far more than just legal risk, HR, company secretarial and government relations. He identified that this was the role that saw him, ‘grow into a senior business leader while developing skills as a senior in house legal professional, including the critical skill of influencing peers and at the board table on diverse topics like culture, risk management and changing legal regulation’. Stevenson’s current role is as the first general counsel in CHAMP’s history, and he is allowed a breadth of mandate that is rare among Australian in-house legal professionals. He has introduced a legal risk management process and philosophy that he describes as ‘aligned to the CEO’s vision for functional expertise within the business but sympathetic to the style and capability of my commercial colleagues’.

This has included process flows, standard documents, panel firm management and a more consistent approach on the common legal risks faced by the business. He is also involved in many of the firm’s most important transactions, the most recent being the sale of Accolade Wines to The Carlyle Group, and he has over the last three years led the legal team on over 10 significant acquisitions of companies ranging in worth from US$30m through to US$200m and three disposals.