As PartnerRe Ltd. approaches its ten year anniversary, general counsel, Christine Patton has a lot to smile about. She has played an important role in preparing the company to take full advantage of a very “buoyant market.”

“1/1/03 is going to be a very big year for writing business,” she says, and her in-house legal department together with a team of external US and local lawyers have had their noses to the grindstone, dealing with the legal ramifications of capital raising for the group.

It's also a constant challenge to keep up with an evolving regulatory environment, but Christine seems to thrive on challenges.

In addition to her professional life, her sailing career includes two Etchells world championships with husband, Tim in Cowes and Melbourne and match racing with Peter Bromby in Savannah Georgia.

This year she was on the team with Paula Lewin which won the Bermuda International Womens' Match Race and came sixth in the Gold Cup, a mixed event.

She says that what she likes about sailing is the mental and a physical “stretch”.

After our interview she is flying off for a “pow wow” with her global legal team. They will be converging on Paris from PartnerRe offices all over the world to discuss matters related to corporate governance issues. She mentions that she has just finished writing a speech in French for one of the workshops they will hold.

Christine does not speak French, but she says she thought it would be a good exercise if all the non-French speakers gave a presentation in French: “It's a good morale boost for the French-speaking staff,” she explains. It strikes me that the rest of the legal staff at PartnerRe must need to enjoy a mental stretch as well. You could say that an adventurous spirit is what led Christine to Bermuda and ultimately to PartnerRe.

An Australian, she originally came to Bermuda in 1978 as a rotary exchange student after leaving high school.

She had such a fantastic year here and made so many great friends that even after she returned to the University of Queensland to study commercial law, she continued to return to Bermuda whenever she could.

By her third trip back to the Island in 1989, she had a lot of commercial experience under her belt. She had been a tax consultant for Coopers and Lybrand and had worked in the capital markets for Wardley Australia.

On that 1989 trip, she was introduced to someone at the Bank of Butterfield and was offered a job. Whereas at that stage many of her peers had decided to spend a couple of years “as photocopiers” for law firms in London, Christine made the unusual decision to stay and work in Bermuda. She was clearly attracted to the outdoors lifestyle - as well as swimming and sailing she also used to be a “pretty good triathlete”. But she also appreciates the lack of commute: “It's a great place for me to live because your professional world, which is actually quite high powered, is only ten minutes away from your home. We live in paradise, in my opinion.”

Christine originally only intended to work in Bermuda for a few years, but shortly after coming back in 1989 she met the man who would keep her here for good. Christine met Tim Patton briefly in 1978 when they were making kites together for a children's charity. Eleven years later she rang him up to ask about taking up sailing. She had remembered that he was passionate about sailing, and she must have made a favourable impression on him too - “Instead of taking me out sailing, he asked me out!”

They now have a son, Campbell, who is nearly two. “He's the love of my life” she says.

A chance conversation with her friend, Scott Moore, led to Christine joining PartnerRe.

She says the then CFO, now current CEO of PartnerRe based in the US was someone she had tremendous respect for and this had a large impact on her decision.

“I really feel that it's not the firm or company that you work for that matters, it's the working mentors that we have through our lives. If you don't feel comfortable working for someone, you will never be happy in that role.”

Christine says that Scott Moore actually warned her that by joining the insurance industry, she would lose some of the security of a career in banking.

He told her: “You're coming from a very safe environment to a very volatile environment” and urged her to be very careful about making this career choice.

But she says that with no children at the time she felt able to throw caution to the wind and it has turned out to be a great decision: “I have been very happy at PartnerRe”.

“It's grown to be a very nice place to work; it's gone through the growing pains of being too small so that there was too much work for each person … now it's a very positive environment.”

When she joined PartnerRe as Scott Moore's assistant, her responsibilities included legal matters, human resources, compliance and office management.

Asked why she stuck with the legal side of the business, she says “I think that's the part that I'm best at.”

She now heads a global legal team of 12 people. As general counsel, some of the major developments she has overseen include PartnerRe listing on the New York Stock Exchange and the acquisition of a French company, SAFR in 1997 and Winterthur Re in 1998-9.

In December 2001, they set up a shelf registration so that PartnerRe could avail itself of a ready filed prospectus in future years and cut down on the regulatory hurdles to be completed each time they go to the capital markets.

Last month PartnerRe completed a common stock issue of 400 million and a year ago they did two issues, a preferred stock and a PEPS (premium equity participating security) issue.

Christine explains that last year's capital raising was necessary because of 9/11 but this year's capital raising was because of an opportunity.

Swiss Re, one of the original backers of PartnerRe had advised them that they wished to reduce their holding. Christine says that PartnerRe were happy to go to the market during what they perceived to be a very buoyant market. They raised $400 million and used $300 million to repurchase SwissRe stock. The left over capital was fed down to a subsidiary to raise its surplus.

In addition to these corporate finance roles, Christine also works with the board in a Corporate Secretary role and also Corporate Compliance falls within her ambit. She recently gave a presentation to the Bermuda Bar Association on the Sarbanes-Oxley Act 2002. She considers that a big issue for lawyers at the moment is what she calls the “whistle blowing” provisions for lawyers which have come out of these regulations. In a nutshell, these appear to put the onus on lawyers dealing with US listed companies to alert both the company and the SEC to any potential wrongdoing. According to Christine, as currently drafted, they represent an area of uncertainty for both in-house lawyers like herself, as no-one knows how they will co-exist with attorney-client privilege.

The proposals are currently with the SEC and there is a 30 day period for comment from the US legal fraternity. Christine speculates that if the proposals are not reworded, there will be interesting times ahead for general counsels of US listed companies.