our mission

Welcome to Icon Law. We want to be the destination advisory practice for executive employment and management equity and incentives. To make that a reality, we deliver the industry’s most experienced specialists, backed up with the brand, resources, technologies and purpose to serve your needs better than anyone else.

our perspective

Right now, the stakes could not be higher for Private Equity and its advisors. The performance of the industry, not to mention future allocations, depends on its ability to steer a highly diverse portfolio of about 65,000 companies to safety. The management team is critical to delivering that success. Icon Law is designed to help Private Equity sponsors get the most out of their management teams. Our focus is advising on management employment issues and the taxation and structuring of share scheme and incentive arrangements across those businesses, on a cross-border basis. We are perfectly placed to support the most progressive sponsors on the employment and incentivisation of management teams and the structuring of tax efficient equity and carry structures.

We regularly lead on the negotiation, drafting and implementation of the management equity piece in Private Equity-backed acquisitions. Even after the deal has closed, we continue to advise on portfolio company executive employment and incentive issues as teams are refreshed and equity may need to be restructured. Regardless of the economic cycle, our expertise is extremely valuable for companies looking to grow. Aligning rewards for the leadership team with the creation of value for investors over a multi-year period can be a complex trade-off. It often means finding innovative approaches to tax, legal and governance problems. That’s where we come in. Our knowledge of how to deal with both employment and share incentive issues, combined with a realtime sense of market benchmarks, helps enormously in closing the deal, but also maintaining post-deal relationships with Private Equity houses and their portfolio companies. It’s all about having one key advisor, trusted to tackle all of the issues.

Over the years, we’ve found that clients clearly prefer this approach. The challenges posed in management equity demand such a broad range of multi-practice skills, from employment and tax issues to share valuation, consumer credit and corporate governance. They also may need to factor in multiple jurisdictions. And so much more. That’s what Icon Law is designed to do; deliver the full solution, brilliantly, with one point of contact.