Kate Bennett

Kate is a founding partner of Arbor Law and established the firm’s UAE practice. She is a senior corporate finance and financial services lawyer advising founders, boards, investors and regulated businesses on capital raising, M&A, governance, FCA regulatory matters, managed compliance and international expansion.

Kate brings more than two decades of experience across private practice and senior in-house legal leadership, spanning the US, UK and international markets, including the Middle East, North Africa and Central and Eastern Europe. In private practice, she has advised on complex international transactions, major capital markets deals, corporate governance and regulatory compliance. She later owned those same matters from inside the business as General Counsel and Company Secretary to FTSE-listed companies, managing external counsel, advising boards and executive teams, and carrying responsibility for how legal, regulatory, governance and transactional decisions worked in practice. This gives her a rare combination of technical legal expertise, commercial judgement, board-level experience and first-hand understanding of how legal advice is used inside businesses.

She began her career at Baker McKenzie in Chicago before relocating to London as a senior associate in the Capital Markets Group. She later moved in-house, serving as UK General Counsel and Group Company Secretary for two FTSE-listed companies, before returning to private practice as a founding partner of Arbor Law.

Kate’s practice focuses on corporate finance, financial services regulation and strategic General Counsel support. She advises on capital raising, M&A, capital markets transactions, shareholder matters, governance, cross-border structuring and UK market entry.

She has particular experience supporting financial services firms, investment businesses, corporate finance houses and international businesses entering the UK. Her work includes FCA authorisation support, MiFID-related advice, Appointed Representative structures, perimeter analysis, governance frameworks, compliance programmes and ongoing managed compliance support.

Kate frequently acts as fractional or Virtual General Counsel to scaling and international businesses, particularly in the financial services sector. She supports leadership teams on regulatory strategy, inward investment, operational setup, managed compliance, commercial decision-making and growth.

Kate founded Arbor to deliver the kind of legal support she believes ambitious businesses actually need: senior, commercially grounded advice without unnecessary complexity, opaque costs or traditional law firm layers. She is particularly committed to making BigLaw-calibre expertise accessible to SMEs, scaling businesses and international entrants, giving clients clear options, practical judgement and advice they can act on with confidence.