Richard Olver

Working with David and the management team to make Bird & Bird more successful is great fun, challenging and extremely rewarding.

I get satisfaction from understanding how a business works in detail and then being an integral part of refining and improving it.

Arthur Andersen showed me the secret of professional services – unending energy and drive to achieve for one's clients, focused competitive aggression in the market, but internally completely collaborative.

I joined Bird & Bird because the people are great and highly skilled, the culture is rightly focussed on achieving great things for our clients, the industry knowledge is like no other, and I was confident we could increase performance. It has exceeded my expectations.

Three years on, we have made the firm more truly global, are winning stunning new clients and work, offering exciting new solutions for our client base, attracting the most talented people and have increased profitability. We're not finished yet!

• Working at Andersen and Deloitte, BSkyB was my major client for all of the 1990s. We helped build what it is today – the early years, flotation, going digital, the Man Utd takeover and the Competition Commission, SkyBet, potential M&A in Germany, France and Italy, rights valuations and acquisitions, redesigning call centres, building Sky.com. The list is long. Visionary, demanding, loyal, exciting.
• Wanting to add value to a business rather than just advise, I joined Lovells where I was one of the three people at the core of negotiating, designing, executing and integrating the merger with Hogan & Hartson to create Hogan Lovells. One of the most significant transformational mergers of the last decade in any industry.