Reed Smith alum, Naz Sachedina (www.linkedin.c...) , shares her journey from qualifying as a lawyer at Reed Smith to her current role as a director at WisdomTree Asset Management. Naz discusses her diverse experiences at Reed Smith, including two secondments, and how these shaped her career. Naz also offers valuable insights on transitioning from private practice to in-house roles and the skills needed for success in the legal industry.
---more---
Transcript:
Intro: Welcome to the Reed Smith podcast, Career Footprints. In each episode of Career Footprints, we'll ask our guest, a Reed Smith alum, to share their career story, how their time at Reed Smith set them up for success, and their advice for early career lawyers. Our goal is to surface insights from inspiring professionals' careers that will help you find your professional success, however you define that.
Lauren: Welcome to another episode of Reed Smith's alumni Career Footprints podcast. This is Lauren Hakala, Reed Smith's Global Director of Learning and Development. Today, I'm thrilled to be joined by London office alum, Naz Sachedina. Naz qualified as a solicitor at Reed Smith and then practiced for about five years in the structured finance team of our financial industry group. Her time at Reed Smith included two secondments, one with Barclays, and then with Merrill Lynch. Since then, Naz's career has included two senior in-house legal posts, first at counsel at Pinebridge Investments, and then as associate director and now director at WisdomTree Asset Management. Naz, welcome.
Naz: Thank you, Lauren. Thank you for having me.
Lauren: I’m very excited for this conversation about your career. So I wanted to see if we could start by you telling us a little bit about your current role at WisdomTree and what you're doing now and what you like about it.
Naz: Yeah, sure. So as you mentioned, I'm a director. I'm actually a director in the product legal team at WisdomTree. So that kind of means I cover the products and platforms rather than the kind of the corporate legal matters, which is covered by another part of our legal team. So WisdomTree in Europe has a very wide range of platforms and asset classes. So underlying assets kind of range from equities to commodities like oil and gold to crypto assets. We have physically backed platforms we have synthetic platforms where swap counterparties provide exposure to the underlying assets through a swap and all our kind of all our platforms are all slightly different so which means the mechanics the way they operate are slightly different. That means a kind of in my role I cover the kind of lifespan of the product so right from when you launch a product to when you do maintenance like doing the prospectus rollover if you have to make amendments if you have to do security holder votes right to the closure of a product so it's kind of cradle to grave as it were for products and I also want to take kind of wider projects within the with the WisdomTree so if we're making changes to a platform rather than specific products. So that's in a nutshell what I do at WisdomTree.
Lauren: And keeping in mind that many of our audience are are newly qualified lawyers and lawyers in their first three years of practice and knowing that you've been in their shoes. What's the best thing about your current role?
Naz: I never get bored, ever, just because of the range of assets and platforms. There's always something new happening, which is still a little terrifying. I remember asking Andrzej, shout out to Andrzej at Reed Smith, like, when do you feel comfortable? And he was like, you never do, Naz. So even though it's slightly terrifying, there are always new things to do, new things to learn. I love learning new things. I'm one of those really sad people that gets very excited by it. And also just, you know, WisdomTree, not just the legal team, but the wider team are great as well. I love the legal team. They're awesome. Everyone I deal with are just really nice and very clever people I always want to be the least clever person in the room which I generally am so um so that means I'm always learning basically.
Lauren: I love that point because I feel like as a junior lawyer sometimes we think that after a couple of years everything will be we'll know what we're doing and we'll just go to work and we'll do the same thing and it sounds like for you that's not the way it is and that's a great thing.
Naz: Yeah agreed yeah I mean I I think I it's one of those things sometimes like I wish I just did the same thing every day but I know myself and people I know like Naz you'd get really bored and I would 100% get really bored so it's the sometimes it's nice when you know that you're like okay I can do this it's fine but yeah do that too much and life does get a bit stale after a while so yes, learning new things is apparently key i...
20 сен 2024
