Berlin/Hamburg/Cologne – As of February 1, 2022, the business law firm YPOG will strengthen its regulatory practice area with the renowned lawyer and regulatory expert Carola Rathke. She joins YPOG together with her team from the renowned international law firm Eversheds Sutherland. Rathke headed the Company Commercial practice group at her previous place of work - most recently as part of the German Management Committee. She now joins YPOG as the second female equity partner. Her team includes Thomas Tüllmann, who will become an Associated Partner at YPOG, as well as Anika Patz, Senior Associate, and Matthias Winter, Associate. With her many years of experience in providing regulatory advice to both traditional and new banks and financial institutions, Rathke will drive the expansion and the further development of the Banking + Financial Services practice group at YPOG together with Lennart Lorenz in the future.
The new team will particularly focus on assisting with BaFin procedures, especially applications for authorization, as well as advising companies that use distributed ledger technologies (DLT). This includes in particular crypto exchanges, crypto custodians and crypto securities registrars, as well as issuers and providers of tokenized (investment) products such as security token offerings, debt securities and fund units.
"We are very pleased to have Carola and her team join us to complement our existing advisory services related to blockchains and digital assets. YPOG has managed to gain a great deal of practical experience with the structuring of crypto funds, the financing of significant crypto projects as well as with transactions in the crypto sector over the past few years. In addition, we have been able to build important expertise on all relevant tax and IP law issues surrounding NFTs and the evolving Metaverse. With regulatory law, which is often key to advice on crypto issues, we round off our range of services in the best possible way", says co-managing partner Jörn Wöbke.
"We are now one of the largest teams in Germany specializing in regulatory advice, especially for alternative financial services providers. We are looking forward to YPOG, because here we have found the optimal environment to expand our strengths in a targeted way and to further develop the area", says Carola Rathke.
Thomas Tüllmann (Hamburg) initially worked for more than 10 years as in-house lawyer and in various other functions at an internationally operating Dutch finance group. With his many years of extensive in-house experience, he has been advising banks, financial and payment service providers as well as capital management companies on regulatory and contractual issues, accompanying proceedings at BaFin and supporting his clients in product developments since joining Eversheds in 2015. Together with Carola Rathke, he has established and expanded the blockchain/DLT advisory practice area at Eversheds Sutherland. Since 2018, he particularly has focused on advising companies whose business model is based on DLT or who develop and distribute DLT-based products and services.
Anika Patz (Berlin) previously worked as a senior associate in the Banking & Finance practice group in Eversheds Sutherland's Berlin office. She advises on banking and capital markets regulatory issues as well as on compliance and money laundering prevention matters. Her focus lies in particular on DLT-based business models. Prior to joining Eversheds Sutherland, Patz worked as in-house counsel for Börse Stuttgart Digital Exchange GmbH. Prior to that, she worked at a German commercial law firm focusing on banking and capital markets law as well as blockchain and FinTech with secondment at Solarisbank AG and its subsidiary, Solaris Digital Assets.
Matthias Winter (Hamburg) completed a legal secondment at crypto trading platform Coinbase before joining YPOG. From 2018 to 2021 he was also part of the Eversheds Sutherland team around Carola Rathke and worked there as a research assistant.
