Andrew Northage

Andrew is a Partner in our Regulatory & Compliance team. He advises clients on a wide range of regulatory and compliance issues, including financial services regulation, information law, financial crime, anti-money laundering and trade and sanctions compliance.

Andrew’s clients are likely to be regulated businesses in the investment sector, including private equity houses, stockbrokers, venture capital, corporate finance houses or wealth managers.

When asked what he finds most rewarding about his work, Andrew says, “it’s the intellectual challenge of solving a client’s problem. That might be finding out what’s gone wrong, getting them into shape to be regulated or putting together incredibly complex structures”. It’s important then he notes, to find the right balance between understanding complex structures and black letter law. And of course, it’s important not to forget to be human too.

Andrew is good at explaining complicated things in a way that people will understand and he attributes this to his days working at the Serious Fraud Office, when he had to explain “fantastically complicated things” to a jury: “I can tell people how everything fits together without sounding like a textbook or putting them to sleep”.

Smart and responsive, but human too

Andrew prefers to take the time to step back from a problem so he can digest it and mull over a solution, but he acknowledges that more often than not, he has to move at pace and he’s always working on balancing those two things.

Easy going and not easily flustered, Andrew is often the person calming everyone down and he says of Walker Morris as a whole, “we have a building full of clever, engaged, talented and ambitious people. We all want to do well, for our clients and ourselves and we’re not just drones in a corporate machine”. In fact, Andrew always says that “to realise how good we are to work with, you need to work us. We really are what we say we are – smart and responsive, but human too”.

Andrew trained to be a lawyer at the Serious Fraud Office, after becoming interested in criminal law as teenager.

Andrew has previously been shortlisted for the Regulatory Lawyer of the Year at the Thomson Reuters Annual Compliance Awards.