© 2018 The Texas Lawbook.
Finalist: Non-General Counsel of the Year
By Mark Curriden
(Jan. 17) – Neuberger Berman may sound like the name of a German law firm, but it is actually one of the fastest growing investment management services companies in the U.S. with an estimated $284 billion of assets under management.
One of the most dynamic business units in the employee-owned Neuberger Berman, according to Bloomberg, is its Alternatives division, which has grown dramatically during the past five years to have more than $56 billion of assets under management.
Neuberger Berman is also the home to one of the smartest young legal minds in the world of private equity and fund formations: Blake Rice, who is a Dallas-based managing director and associate general counsel at New York-based Neuberger Berman.
A former corporate lawyer at Hughes & Luce and Hallett & Perrin, Rice has quietly become one of the most respected transactional in-house counsel around; he has developed an expertise in crafting highly sophisticated deals across multiple jurisdictions in the U.S. and internationally.
“The biggest challenge and the biggest enjoyment of this job is the dynamism of the business over the past five years,” says Rice, who is intricately involved in many of Alternative’s new business developments, as well as fund launches that are critical components of the firm’s future growth. “I’ve been here for 10 years now, but it has been four different jobs that merged into each other.”
Rice’s expertise and successful handling of complicated financial global transactions is the reason that the Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook have named the lawyer as a finalist for the 2017 Outstanding Corporate Counsel’s Non-General Counsel of the Year Award for a Small Legal Department.
The finalists are being honored – and the winners announced – at the Outstanding Corporate Counsel Awards event at the Bush Institute on Thursday, Jan. 25.
In nominating Rice for the award, Haynes and Boone partners Vicki Odette and Matthew Schindel wrote: “it’s hard to overstate the intricacy of the work that Rice handles with tremendous skill.”
Many of Rice’s transactions are “large, sophisticated transactions involving U.S. taxable and tax-exempt investors as well as foreign investors,” according to Odette and Schindel. “Because most deals are individualized for the particular client, most of what Rice does requires creativity and a deep understanding of the law and the business objectives of the parties.”
Rice received his bachelor’s degree in political science from Trinity University in 1999 and a law degree from the University of Chicago in 2002.
After practicing law for five and a half years, he went in-house to work as a legal adviser focused on private equity funds.
For Rice, the work day starts early.
“This is a worldwide business with offices in Hong Kong, Milan and London, and I need to connect with them early in the morning or I lose them,” he says. “There are very few days when I come into the office knowing what I am going to spend most of my day working on.”
Rice says that his job is to identify potential problems and find answers.
“If the default position of a lawyer is to say no to new or complex deals and challenges, then the value of that in-house lawyer is less and less,” he says. “This is problem-solving with really high stakes.”
Rice played a lead legal adviser role for Neuberger in its 2017 investments in video gaming company, a European parking lot operator and a truck bed liner business.
“That’s what I love about this job,” he says. “The work is always unique.”
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