Catherine is passionately interested in the role of the client in determining the future of legal services. She developed GC Magazine to focus on the intersection of business and management issues in relation to the role of the modern global general counsel. She is also a long-time advocate of diversity and inclusion in the law.
Catherine’s career over recent years has been concentrated on strategic engagement with clients of law firms and in developing practically focused content to assist in their aims and objectives outside of technical legal requirements.
Catherine now works as an independent advisor to law firms and legal departments around the world. Her work focuses on the practical challenges for modern legal departments, in-house lawyers and their companies and the related challenges and opportunities for their advisors that understanding their clients can bring. Additionally, she acts as Editor-in-Chief of Skaicre, a specialist community for real estate general counsel and lawyers.
Catherine’s last role was as Editor-in Chief of GC Magazine and as Publishing Director of The Legal 500’s and Legalease’s in-house lawyer initiatives. She founded GC Magazine and was responsible for strategic engagement with in-house counsel and for delivery of selected high-level content and associated events across the Legal 500. She continues to work with The Legal 500 on selected projects like their flagship GC Conference, Enterprise GC.
Catherine has many years of experience in the legal publishing space, originally as Managing Editor at Chambers and Partners. Her role there was to provide management and editorial oversight of all Chambers publications and events. She was also responsible for business strategy at Chambers and Partners.
After Chambers, she spent a year at, Lawdragon, a US based legal magazine. While there she created a product called Insights which focused on key trends in a practice area from both the lawyer and client respective as well as giving more expert and extended analysis of leading firm and lawyers in a practice area than the traditional directories.
In the diversity and inclusion space, Catherine is passionate about promoting diversity and inclusion in the legal industry. She started the Chambers Women in Law initiative in 2009 to celebrate the achievements of women lawyers. At GC Magazine and The Legal 500 she created a series of reports, which have been described as some of the most useful in the space. These considered the role of in-house lawyers both in being part of change both their own organisations and in creating change in the wider legal industry.
A key focus of much of her work in this space has been analysing the practical steps in creating diversity and inclusion initiatives. Catherine has also developed a range of events and workshops which explore diversity and inclusion in the legal industry.
She was born in London and gained a bachelor’s degree and Ph.D. in Literature and Drama. Prior to moving into legal publishing, she was a lecturer at universities in the UK and USA, including the Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston.