Growing up on a 230-acre farm outside of Asheville, N.C. — where her daily chores included bottle feeding baby calves — Sherri Snelson ’95 always knew she wanted to be an attorney. “I idolized my grandfather, whose friends, like (former N.C. Governor and Senator) Terry Sanford ’46 and (former Congressman) Jamie Clark, would come to the farm for barbecues,” she says. “The lawyers and judges were the people my grandfather respected, so I wanted to be one too.”
Snelson, who is a partner and member of the corporate finance practice in the London office of O’Melveny and Myers, says, “I am a very different kind of lawyer than I could have ever imagined as a kid.” Snelson’s finance and restructuring practice includes advising investment funds and corporations on how to raise money and negotiating financing terms.
“I find the practice broader in scope and more interesting than my work in the U.S.,” Snelson says. “It truly is a multijurisdictional practice. In the U.S., I did some transactions that had an international element, but in the American finance world, unless you’re dealing with the very largest companies, you are just concentrating on the U.S. assets.” She compares that to her work in London, where she can’t remember doing any deal in which the company was only located in England. “I am working on joint ventures in Portugal, Spain and Italy, and a loan for a China-focused investment fund in Hong Kong,” Snelson says.
Dual qualified in England and the U.S., Snelson says she ended up in London, “partly by plan and partly by accident.” After getting her law degree from Carolina, she joined McGuireWoods in Richmond, Va. “The partner I worked for and I were the finance practice,” she says. “It wasn’t a big team.” She began New York University’s Executive MBA program in 2000, which meant weekly commuting to New York City for class.
“The partner I was working with wanted to move to New York, so I joined him there at Mayer Brown for two years,” Snelson says. With her MBA in hand, she moved to Fried Frank’s New York City office, which sent her to London for a two- to three-year assignment. “That was 10 1/2 years ago,” she laughs. “I love living in London.”
Snelson says that she has made a point of not just hanging out with other Americans because she “didn’t want to live in an expat bubble. I am living in a very diverse multicultural city and am taking advantage of that. Most of my friends are not lawyers, and they are from all over the world.”
Active in the community, Snelson serves as a trustee of Smart Works, a nonprofit organization that provides appropriate clothing and interviewing skills for women who are trying to get back into the workforce. “It is extremely gratifying to watch the organization go from a very small charity to something that is well-funded, respected by government bodies and receiving a lot of recognition for what we’re doing,” she says.
Snelson and her London-born husband get back to North Carolina at least twice a year. “I have spent three years renovating the main farm house on our family’s farm, which my father and brother run,” she says. “My husband and I are developing a French Perigord truffle business on the land. When I was a child in Western North Carolina, the cash crop was tobacco. With farms struggling to stay viable, I was looking for a cash crop we could introduce on the farm that wouldn’t be terribly labor intensive, so we can supervise from London.”
Although she never expected to have an international law career, Snelson says that Carolina Law prepared her for success. “One of the best things I took from Carolina is learning how to think like a lawyer and to use a logical approach,” she says. “I now really appreciate the practical aspects — how to analyze and puzzle solve — that Carolina teaches. Carolina helped me learn how to think.”
This article was originally published in the Fall-Winter 2014 issue of Carolina Law.
-December 1, 2014