Sarah Murphy is the head of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer's global U.S. capital markets practice and co-head of its international capital markets group. She is a London-based U.S. partner of the firm and has more than 25 years' experience of advising a wide range of clients from around the world. She acts for companies looking to access the US and international capital markets, and also for the investment banks acting as intermediaries. Clients come from various sectors including financial institutions, energy and natural resources, telecoms and infrastructure.
Her track record includes the full range of equity, debt and hybrid offerings, including IPOs, rights issues, GDR offerings, accelerated book builds, all types of bond issuance including high yield, Yankee bonds and bond programmes, as well as liability management transactions such as consent solicitations and tender and exchange offers for bonds and notes. She advises companies and investment banks on cross border public and private M&A transactions. Clients also value her advice on compliance and disclosure issues, such as conflict minerals disclosure under the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 and compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. Sarah's deals tend to be complex and cross-border and clients know they can rely on her experience, efficiency and strong technical ability. She is cited as being both "practical and very effective" in the Chambers UK Directory 2013 and "well respected" and "technically superb" in the Legal 500 2012. She also has innovative way of looking at things that delivers a fresh approach to structuring and implementing solutions.
Sarah is a regular speaker at external conferences, most recently the Listing Regime Conference in London in December 2012 (Butterworths/LexisNexis). She is on the Advisory Committee for the Practising Law Institute's Annual Securities Institute on EU and US Securities Law in London. Sarah has received the Best in Capital Markets: Debt Award at the Europe Women in Business Law Awards 2012 and was named one of the 100 most influential women in European finance by the Financial News in 2008.
Sarah joined the firm as a partner in 1998 in London. Previously she was at Cravath, Swaine and Moore (New York and London). She was educated at Williams College (B.A., 1977) and Fordham (J.D., 1983).