Kate Wormald

Leaders in Law endorses Kate Wormald as our exclusively recommended Prime Brokerage and Derivatives expert in the UK. If you wish to get in touch with Kate, please use the contact information provided above.

Kate has advised and represented a large cross section of the hedge fund community and alternative asset managers over the past 20 years, since founding Oesa in 2002. She has also been engaged by Ernst and Young, large pension funds, a well-known charitable trust, industrial corporates and proprietary trading houses, all of whom required specialist legal advice in relation to their trading and derivative documentation.

Kate qualified as a barrister but decided to pursue a career in the City in house, as a sales and trading legal adviser. Specialising in derivatives and complex structured products, she gained invaluable experience in-house at several large financial institutions including Daiwa Securities, Salomon Brothers (now Citi) and Goldman Sachs, where she was the head of the European capital markets legal team that encompassed not only all the derivative trading activity for EMEA but also its prime brokerage business.

Kate’s advice at all of these institutions was integral to the development of a vast array of new innovative financial products.  In addition, she contributed to the many industry initiatives to standardise documentation, including the ISDA Master Agreement and CSA, FOA ETD agreements, and the GMRA.

Prior to setting up Oesa, Kate was a consultant to the then FSA and was one of the original authors of the Market Abuse Code and the Wholesale Money Markets Code of Conduct.

Kate’s wealth of experience is unmatched today in the alternative asset manager space and she has used this to run Oesa successfully as a bespoke consultancy focused on delivering timely solutions to clients.

Firm Description:

We pride ourselves on working in the most commercial and effective ways to ensure the best fit with our clients’ strategies and objectives.

As a niche consultancy we are able to offer a fresh and flexible approach to fees. We are not constrained by billing at hourly rates and in increments of minutes whether used or not. We can offer retainers, fixed fees, project fees or an hourly rate to meet individual needs and budgetary requirements.

We have several different strands to our business. Whatever service is required we will always be practical, commercial and easy to deal with. We truly understand our clients and their business environments enabling us to give the best solutions in a timely manner.