About

As global head of legal for international agribusiness leader Al Dahra Holding, Dawn Sanderson has the privilege of working on some of the most noteworthy and high-value deals in the sector worldwide. Indeed, two of her major career highlights have occurred with large deals completed on behalf of the company last year. ‘Completing the acquisition of the largest farm in Europe in June 2018 was a milestone for the company and for me’, she says, ‘as it was a large and complex transaction, involving Romanian Competition Council approval. There were many local law challenges in relation to the real estate and concession elements of the business. Alongside this, we completed the cross-border merger of our Spanish and Italian businesses in July 2018 – I had not been involved in a EU cross-border merger until this point in my career and it was extremely interesting for me to work with both jurisdictions – coordinating different firms in each one – and the local minority shareholders, in each jurisdiction, to achieve the successful close of this transaction, which has subsequently greatly benefited the business’. She believes her work on these and other major transactions, including the acquisition of a state-owned enterprise in Serbia, have had a major impact on her legal and business skills. ‘These transactions have shaped me as they have enabled me to grow as an M&A and in-house lawyer’, Sanderson explains. ‘They helped me to develop existing skills and learn new ones, particularly in the areas of project management of external counsel, cost control and managing numerous extra-terrestrial third parties whose first language is not English. Indeed for the Romania and Serbia deals where the acquisition targets were domestically owned, integration of two businesses of such size into the international framework of the Al Dahra Group has been a significant challenge for all parties’. Sanderson was also keen to emphasise her internal achievements with the Al Dahra Holding legal function, particularly her painstaking selection of a global law firm panel and a new legal management system, which is an enterprise resource planning initiative. These initiatives, along with developing a legal protocol for other business units to use, have borne fruit: ‘Since my arrival I have been able to demonstrate that the legal department is a valuable resource and that a company of our size requires more internal legal resource. Even so, we continue to manage the legal matters for over 60 entities in 18 different jurisdictions with a comparatively small team by global standards’.