Winner: Royal Bank of Scotland
In-house deal teams can be broadly divided into two groups. There are the institutional teams that run large numbers of deals; and the company teams, which work on fewer deals, but for whom the experience is often more intensive and challenging. You cannot get much bigger than Rio Tinto’s contested $38.1bn (£18.5bn) acquisition of Alcan, a deal that catapulted Rio Tinto’s senior London M&A lawyer, Sandra Walker, into the limelight. Walker was a member of Rio Tinto’s top project management team and was responsible for all legal input. Also heavily involved was UK legal adviser Charles Lawton, who was responsible for co-ordinating the record-breaking $40bn (£19bn) financing, and competition lawyer Sarah Rumsby. Overseeing it all was general counsel Stephen Creese.
