Sara L. Terheggen

Terheggen specializes in private equity fund formation and securities transactions. She has worked on more than $100 billion worth of corporate transactions for some of the world’s largest companies and private equity and venture capital funds.

In 2018 she opened her legal and business solutions firm, and saw year-over-year growth of 109 percent. This year NBD is on track to see a fourfold increase, and with deals bouncing back to near pre-pandemic levels, Terheggen expects 2021 to be another busy year.

She represented the underwriters on the first non-biotech, post-COVID IPO for GAN Ltd. The London-based online gambling platform raised gross proceeds of $54 million.

One challenge was conducting the IPO selling process virtually, without the typical roadshow or in-person meetings. GAN also was moving from the Alternative Investment Market in London to the Nasdaq, so Terheggen was working with GAN’s counsel in both the UK and U.S.

“It was a huge team, and a lot of effort to get GAN listed on the Nasdaq, get the initial public offering here in the U.S., then deal with the delisting from [Alternative Investment Market] and that entire corporate governance process,” she said. “It was a great transaction, at a time that was very tumultuous, and it introduced new and innovative approaches.”

Before starting NBD, Terheggen was a partner at a top law firm. But the business model didn’t allow her to serve clients in the way she wanted. And, she said, BigLaw didn’t have the kind of culture she yearned for – one that values equity, transparency and flexibility.

“It’s very important for me to be part of a firm that wants to advance equity for women and minorities, where the goal is cycling them up, not cycling them out,” she said. “I wanted to be able to build that culture from the ground up.”

She has done that with NBD, which stands for Never Back Down. The firm promotes equity through transparent policies regarding promotion and pay, and it abolished minimum hourly requirements, allowing lawyers to focus on clients rather than billable hours.

Terheggen’s advocacy of women and minorities extends beyond NBD. As an elected California Delegate for the Vision 2020 Campaign for Equality, she developed a Think Tank series focused on increasing the number of women in senior leadership positions. She created the Leverage Dinner Network to give women a platform for generating business opportunities, and sits on the advisory board for Humans for AI and the board of Rising International.

— Jennifer Chung Klam