When Mark Chapman, general counsel of Nomura woke up on September 15 2008, he knew that it was not going to be a normal day. From the moment he walked into his London office to manage Nomura's take-over of parts of Lehman, his role within the business was transformed.
"The unexpected had happened: the market was in chaos and lawyers had to come to the forefront to take the heat out of the crisis," he says. What he did not expect was that it would be a long-term change.
Mr Chapman's experience is not an isolated one. Dirk Tirez, general counsel for Belgian Post, says: "The financial crisis reinvented the way we [in-house lawyers] work."