Nicola O’Connor joins growing regulatory team from Bird & Bird
Constantine Law, the “agile” employment and regulatory specialist law firm has recruited Nicola O’ Connor to join the firm. The appointments take Constantine Law to a headcount of 9 partners and 13 fee earning staff- with an all-female team of four senior lawyers within the firm’s regulatory and investigations practice.
Nicola joins from international firm, Bird & Bird. She brings with her over 20 years of experience advising senior professionals and corporates in relation to financial crime offences and risk management. She regularly advises those at senior management and director level positions.
Her focus is on leading internal investigations into regulatory breaches or alleged financial crime including fraud, bribery and corruption, facilitation of tax evasion and money laundering offences. She also guides businesses when reporting to regulators and during regulatory investigations. Nicola advises international corporate clients, performing reviews, stress tests and developing AML, anti-bribery and corruption, modern slavery and fraud prevention programs. She supports compliance functions and MLRO’s, Nicola also provides a triage service to businesses to assist with AML queries and reporting concerns.
She provides bespoke training to businesses in relation to financial crime topics and the preventative procedures that need to be in place to avoid regulatory breaches. The training also extends to preparing for the possibility of a dawn raid conducted by HMRC, SFO or the police.
Nicola joins a growing team of senior lawyers at Constantine Law, a firm set up by John Hayes in 2015 which last year recruited employment partner Suki Hayes, and regulatory and corporate crime partners Emma Vernon (consultant) and Jemma Sherwood-Roberts. In January 2021, the firm joined forces with Nick Hine and his specialist employment team from Hine Legal.
Nicola will also join highly regarded Regulatory and Investigations Partner Sarah Wallace to create the four strong all female regulatory and corporate crime team.
Commenting on the new appointments, Managing Partner John Hayes said, “At Constantine Law we have created a new type of law firm – one that is entrepreneurial and agile and works to a lean business model delivering a smarter, more responsive service to our clients. We are without the fixed costs of many firms which enables us to offer senior expert advice at extremely good value prices.”
“We are also more progressive: we don’t impose targets and solicitors have more freedom to do and develop work. The fact that we now have an all-female regulatory team is a testament to the attractions of working for a collegiate firm like ours in these modern times and a testament to our business model.”
“There is no doubt demand for advice on regulatory, financial crime and misconduct matters is a growing market – both for individuals and for businesses. The SFO has urged companies to invest in strong compliance programmes and the FCA is increasing its enforcement programme, including over market abuse.
“We are delighted Nicola has decided to join our team which positions us well to deal with this upsurge in activity.”