Geoff is a founding partner of Croke Fairchild Morgan & Beres.  He serves as lead counsel for M&A transactions for many public and private companies and private equity firms.  He also serves as lead counsel for public offerings of equity and debt. He also counsels boards of directors on corporate governance and internal investigations.

Simon Ward is a partner in the Farrer & Co Corporate team. His focus is on private capital and providing advice to clients on investing their capital in corporate and alternative asset classes. A significant amount of Simon's work is in the private equity market where he acts for:

• Private and family offices making direct investment or co-investing alongside traditional private equity funds
• Senior executives and management teams on buy-outs and joining private equity backed businesses, and
• International investors and acquirers.

Prior to joining Farrers, Simon was a senior associate at Mallesons Stephen Jacques (now King & Wood Mallesons) in Sydney. He obtained an in-depth and practical knowledge of the international private equity market, acting for sellers, acquiring funds and management teams on both leveraged and non-leveraged buy outs. Simon has a strong interest in the inbound work between the US and the UK and travels to the US on a regular basis to meet clients and other professionals to speak on UK private capital and direct investment.

Co-founder of Virtas Partners with a particular emphasis and expertise in carve-outs, divestitures and IPOs. Prior to starting Virtas, Neal led a $200M M&A and accounting business for a $25B international consulting firm.

Neal has supported private equity firms and corporations across the ownership lifecycle for more than 20 years. Mandates have included separation/divestiture planning, negotiation, and execution (including numerous spin-off and corporate divestitures), carve-out financial statement preparation, IPO preparation and execution, finance transformation, interim CFO and restructuring under Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Neal is a CPA and has been an instructor for the AIRA's Certified Restructuring and Insolvency Advisor Program.

Neal has served clients including: ABB, Abbot, Accenture, BP, Credit Suisse, CSC, CSRA, Degussa, Delphi, Duke Energy, Emerson Electric, Gauge Capital, Harris Corp, Hawker Beechcraft, Johnson Controls, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, SwissAir Group, Syngenta, Timken and United Technologies Corporation.