Energy specialist Marie Gaschignard joins Floyd Zadkovich as Partner
Senior in-house energy & commodities lawyer moves back to private practice, as challenges and opportunities in the energy and LNG sector multiply faster than the expertise available to handle them.
LONDON – Floyd Zadkovich has appointed Marie Gaschignard as a Partner in its London office, with effect from 1 September. She joins from BP, where she spent just over a decade in the LNG legal team, and will work alongside Partner Damon Thompson in the firm’s energy and commodities practice. The appointment follows four arrivals in the London team over the summer.
Gaschignard’s appointment furthers a deliberate strategy to guide clients through the increasing complexity within the energy and commodities trading environment, in particular LNG. Building on the firm’s reputation in handling non-contentious contractual work and high-value contentious work, with lawyers who genuinely understand this specialist product, Marie adds considerable deep experience and unique insights from an energy market leader with a particular focus in LNG.
Gaschignard began her career at Holman Fenwick Willan in 2007 and qualified in England and Wales in 2009. She spent the best part of nine years with the firm’s commodity trading practice across three jurisdictions, moving from London to Melbourne and Sydney, where she requalified in New South Wales, and then to Hong Kong, where she requalified again. Arbitration accounted for the majority of her practice throughout: soft commodities in Australia, including a secondment to GrainCorp, and iron ore and coal in Hong Kong.
She moved in-house at BP following a secondment to its oil and oil products legal team in London, joining the company’s LNG legal team in March 2016 and remaining there for the decade since.
Marie Gaschignard comments: “In ten years of instructing law firms from the client side, the same problem kept coming up. We always found it extremely difficult to find external lawyers who genuinely knew their way around an SPA. That gap is what brought me here. Floyd Zadkovich already has the capability and the client base in this market, and my role is to add further depth and in-house experience alongside it across our entire commodities offering. My ambition is straightforward: to be the person – alongside Damon – that this industry goes to when the stakes are highest.”
Damon Thompson comments: “I originally saw this problem from the same side of the desk from my 7.5 years at Gazprom as in-house lawyer. LNG runs on some of the most heavily negotiated and least standardised contracts in the market, and the pool of lawyers who can understand every element of such contracts properly is very small. Perhaps surprisingly, years later, that issue still runs true. . Marie has advised on these contracts under real commercial pressure, with huge deals and disputes on the line, and done so brilliantly for over a decade. Complemented by her experience across other sectors, we’re thrilled to have her on board.”
Founder Luke Zadkovich comments: “We have always seen value in combining in-house and private practice experience at the firm. That continues to prove an effective way of understanding what drives the commercial decisions underpinning international trade. Marie personifies this strategy in action. Adding a decade of experience gained inside a major trader, on top of a decade in private practice at a major law firm, is an exciting move for us. This speaks for itself on where we intend to take our Energy and Commodities practice.”
The appointment caps a period of sustained recruitment in London. Margaux Harris joined as a Senior Associate in June, followed by Imogen Harding, Alicia Cranston and Noa Gubbay as Associates over July and August. Five arrivals in a single quarter take the firm to nearly 40 lawyers across New York, London, Chicago, Sydney and Houston. Our growth continues to be led by client demand and exciting opportunities.
Learn more about Marie’s background here.
