About

‘Believing that my career should start with the most rigorous and demanding training and work pressure that I could find’, Christopher Stephens began his career with 12 years in the New York law firm scene, spending – as he puts it – ‘a few years getting trained and battle-hardened’. This clearly provided a rock-solid foundation for him to build on, and he moved from here to the Hong Kong branch of Coudert Brothers where he was a major influence in leveraging the firm’s platform in Asia before the unfortunate demise of the company in 2005. Stephens himself bounced back from this setback extremely successfully, rising to the rank of head of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe’s Asian offices and finance practices during his time here from 2005 to 2012, at which point he decided to take on a new challenge with the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and a role as general counsel. Here, among other important projects, he co-led the legal side of the largest transaction in the bank’s history – the US$32bn merger of Asian Development Fund (ADF) and ADB: ‘My predecessors in the general counsel role had formally opined that a merger was not possible, given the legal constraints and prohibitions in the Bank’s charter. But we created a transaction structure that overcame the obstacles, and completed the merger in 2017. The merger involved innovative structuring, and several “re-interpretations” of the Bank’s charter relating to separation of operations, withdrawal and liquidation preferences, and required the unanimous consent of all 34 donor countries; sensitive consultations with finance ministries and governments of those countries; and novel approaches to our rating agencies and our auditors. The completed merger tripled the capital of the bank from US$18bn to US$53bn, increased annual lending by 50% and financing for poorest countries by 70%, while diversifying portfolio risk and preserving the bank’s AAA credit rating’. Stephens has also undertaken a comprehensive recalibration of attitudes within the legal team towards a more competence-based approach – which was at odds with established norms when he took over. ‘ADB is a traditional public institution, with many public sector practices and traditions. But its business is in one of the most dynamic sectors (banking and finance) and in the most dynamic region in the world (Asia). Some entrenched practices in the bank had to change in order to meet the demands of the market and our clients, and one of those was the practice of personnel management. Accordingly, we sought buy-in from the staff in the legal department, and started to transition from a seniority-based HR system to a merit-based system for promotions and career management’, he says.