Hugh Owen, long-time Partner at Allen & Overy, has announced that he is retiring from the Magic Circle firm and will practice independently as Go2 Law going forward. Owen will continue to operate out of Slovakia, where he has lived since 2000 -- though since November 2013 he spent the majority of his time working in A&O's Budapest office.
Owen obtained his law degree from Kings College London, University of London in 1992 and first joined A&O in 1994 as a trainee. He did a secondment in Prague in 1995, and qualified in London in 1996. According to him, "I returned to Prague in 1998, and in 2000 went to Bratislava where I assisted in the opening of the office. I started then to work in Romania and Bulgaria, soon afterwards expanded to include the former Yugoslavia, and then set up and headed the SEE desk. In 2008 I spearheaded the successful opening of our associated office in Romania. In 2015 I became head of the Ukraine Desk and recently assisted in launching a new Baltic desk. I have been a partner since 2004."
Among the many large-scale corporate and commercial transactions throughout CEE Owen has worked on over the years are a number of privatizations in Slovakia and Romania. He specializes in private equity, including advising on the acquisition by AIG Capital Partners of a controlling stake in Bulgarian Telecommunications AD, which, at nearly EUR 2 billion, represented the largest M&A transaction ever in Bulgaria and one of the largest leveraged finance transactions in Central & South Eastern Europe.
Owen will officially retire from Allen & Overy on July 31, 2017, though he expects to retain a professional relationship with the firm going forward, albeit in a different form. "My consultancy is non-exclusive," he says, "but the expectation is that for now my main client will be A&O."
Among other contributions, Owen wrote the Guest Editorial for the October 2014 issue of the CEE Legal Matters magazine.
Editor's Note: After this article was published, Hugh Owen sent the following statement to CEE Legal Matters: "It has been a real pleasure to work with exceptional colleagues at A&O across the globe and in CEE, working for a Magic Circle firm for nearly quarter of a century. I am looking forward to this next stage of my career, where I will continue to work with many of my A&O colleagues and A&O's relationship firms in C&SEE and the Baltics, focusing on English law M&A."
