ALUMNI STORIES & MORE: GET TO KNOW.....

My name is Theodoros Fostieris and I am an alumnus of 2018-19. After completing the LL.M. Finance program at the Institute for Law and Finance (ILF), I extended my stay in Frankfurt as an employee at the European Central Bank and later at the banking and finance team of a top tier law firm. I recently returned to my home country - Greece - where I am currently working at a leading law firm in Athens, with a specialisation in Project Finance.

Recalling the period of my studies at ILF, I value it as a demanding, yet fruitful experience. The program’s primary element of success lies in the diverse composition of its academic community, with a reference to the lecturers’ circle, consisting of highly qualified professors along with distinguished practitioners, as well as to the multicultural students’ group, composed of persons with different starting points, academic backgrounds and level of professional experience. Such pluralism, along with a strongly interactive teaching model, promote constructive academic discussion and multifaceted knowledge synthesis.

The program features an interdisciplinary and broad syllabus, allowing students to either pursue a specialisation path in a particular sector, or adopt a macroscopic approach and attempt to grasp the “bigger picture” and acquire the necessary foundations for the development of further expertise on a specific legal or regulatory field. As a person who opted for the latter, such knowledge enabled me to develop a holistic perspective of the intertwined legal, regulatory, but also economic and financial framework and thus apply such approach in the legal practice, by being in a position to interpret clients’ business drivers and provide customed advice serving their needs, by way of “translating” such commercial aspirations into legal language, which I consider to be a key competence of a legal practitioner working in the broader sector of financial advisory services.

All the above, along with the networking opportunities in the established, yet continuously rising German market, the fostering of personal relations of cooperation among students, as well as the firm support provided by the academic personnel, provide the program with a significant competitive advantage.