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The HarbourVest Boston Team

Paula Drake

Managing Director, General Counsel

Boston

About Paula

Paula Drake joined HarbourVest to lead the Legal and Regulatory Compliance team in 2017 and oversees all aspects of the Firm’s global legal, regulatory, and compliance functions. She brings a strong mix of industry, government, and private law experience.

Paula joined HarbourVest from Och-Ziff Capital Management, where she was most recently Managing Director, Chief Compliance Officer and Chief Regulatory Officer responsible for transforming and leading the global compliance department. Her prior experience includes three years with U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as an Associate Director, Chief Counsel, and Chief Compliance Officer for the Office of Compliance, Inspections and Examinations. Prior to that, she was General Counsel and Chief Operating Officer at Oechsle International Advisors. She also held roles at Fidelity Investments and Ropes and Gray.

Paula received a BA (magna cum laude) in 1977, MA (with distinction) in 1985, and a PhD (with distinction) in 1987 all in English, from the University of Massachusetts and a JD (cum laude) from Harvard Law School.

Continuation solutions encompass a host of transaction types in which a GP secures interim liquidity and/or additional primary capital for their LPs in a strongly performing asset, or set of assets, that the GP will continue to own and control. Specifically, they include continuation funds, new funds created by GPs for the purpose of acquiring the asset(s) that continue to be managed by the same GP and capitalized by one or several secondary buyers, or equity recapitalizations involving a direct equity or structured equity investment into a portfolio company. These transactions can also include a parallel investment from the GP’s latest fund into that same pool of assets (a “cross-fund trade”).