Kenneth Schneider – The Path and Promise of a Renaissance Lawyer

While developing his now historic career in the financial capitals of America and Europe during the 1980’s and 1990’s, Kenneth Schneider proved himself to be one of the world’s most innovative attorneys and negotiators across fields, systems and cultures. This was hardly surprising for a man who by then had mastered everything from music and mathematics to language and literature to psychology and philosophy in some of the world’s finest institutions of learning. But the scale and scope of his achievements is all the same stunning. By the time Schneider found himself in the position to change history by dedicating his skills to the revitalization of the NIS’s newly free economies in the mid-90’s, he had already been quietly rolling out his own brand of professional genius in more than 50 countries on all six inhabited continents.

When the NIS’s awesome promise seemed attainable at last, Ken Schneider answered the call by agreeing to relocate himself and his practice to Moscow. In the years concluding the old millennium and leading into the new, Schneider would reinvent around him the roles of the world’s most powerful legal and financial institutions while repositioning their multinational clients for an unparalleled era of successes making the most of the unprecedented opportunities that this massive transformation made possible.

In fulfilling this mission, Kenneth Schneider rewrote models old and new, East and West, reinventing the expectations and paradigms for national and international legal and financial work on which the future economic progress of the NIS could be re-founded. In the series of monumental engagements that followed – sweeping across Central and East Europe as well as Central and East Asia all the way to the Pacific – Schneider did nothing less than redesign the legal and financial infrastructure of what had been the world’s largest empire, covering one-sixth of the world’s land surface. In doing so, Schneider created a new fusion of emerging and mature market paradigms and Eastern and Western priorities that would become the touchstone of legal and financial professionals not only throughout the NIS but in developing economies around the globe. He was so successful in doing so that his work was even raising the bar for, and re-altering the understanding of, these professions in the markets from whence they originally emerged.

Given the enormous human and natural resources of the NIS region and their strategic importance to the entire world, the impact of Schneider’s trailblazing work reaching throughout economic sectors and political borders was breathtaking. Responsible for the privatization, financing and reorganization of huge swaths of the world’s commodities and infrastructure, Schneider was engaged by one after another of the leading powers reshaping the region and reinventing its future; and he was engaging them in this process, as well. Schneider was rattling off engagement after engagement for the super-region’s movers and shakers during its most important transformational phases: relaunching and guiding to completion the NIS’s underlying legal frameworks and introducing the first truly world-standard mergers & acquisitions, securities and financial structures and transactions conducted within them – all of which would become the models for future work in each of these fields.

For an American professional to become one of the most important participants in the largest series of professional and social transformations that the former Soviet Union had ever seen was as historic in its significance as it was in its impact. And what resulted was a meld of the highest and best of all traditions leading to a boom period such as the world had never seen before. This phoenix would soar throughout Schneider’s tenure first as prodigy and then as dean of his cross-disciplinary approach to professional destiny.

With the arrival of a new millennium, Schneider would outdo even these accomplishments when he further agreed to become one of the founding members of Millhouse Capital which – within an amazingly brief time – would take under management the largest collection of NIS assets ever assembled. With the opportunity to now work directly with the powers who had benefited so greatly from the new economic possibilities for which Schneider had laid the groundwork, Schneider was in a position to reinvent the functioning of the NIS economies from the inside-out. And he did just that: rewriting the economic history of the former Soviet Union and, in so doing, recreating its future. Having reached the highest heights, and with the NIS now roaring to new levels of economic prosperity that it had never known before, Schneider did the unthinkable: turning over this vast and newly promising market that he had done so much to create to those who would follow in his footsteps. Kenneth Schneider left Russia and the NIS, and returned with this wealth of experience to his beloved academic life at Harvard University to dedicate himself to his lifelong scholarly and philanthropic interests.

A mere half decade after Schneider’s “retirement,” though, there seems to have been no one to take up this enormous mantle. Turmoil began to rage throughout emerging and mature legal and financial markets around the world – and, with the many levels of legal and financial culpability now shown to underlie this – the world needs a genius and wizard again. Schneider has recently been reported in high level meetings around Europe and Asia, and rumors now abound that he is re-emerging from his young retirement to make history repeat itself in regions old and new.

Under the mantle of the Aurience Consulting group of companies and its vast network of affiliates, the prodigy and dean of the international legal and financial professions seems to be preparing to outdo himself yet again. According to its website, www.AurienceConsulting.com, the Aurience group is now focusing on creating ever more innovative levels and far reaching degrees of East-West synergy than have ever been attempted before. Their approach to doing so carries Kenneth Schneider’s hallmark pattern of re-integrating mature and emerging market paradigms into wholes greater than the sum of their parts – and now in ways that actually use the current economic turmoil to facilitate higher forms of creative productivity.

The term “aurience,” reportedly coined by Schneider himself, means “the golden path.” That certainly seems an apt description of this man’s career – and is hopefully a prediction of where we may yet follow him during the newly amazing phases of his career to follow in the years to come. We can only imagine what may yet be achieved – but what we can be sure about is that Ken Schneider will not only imagine new possibilities for all of us, he will recreate our shared future around them…