Bruce Buck


Bruce M. Buck is an American lawyer and founding managing partner of the London office of law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. He is also Chairman of Chelsea Football Club. His practice areas are European mergers and acquisitions, project finance and capital markets.

Law career

Bruce Buck has been practising law in Europe since 1983. He left New York for England in 1983 for a “standard tour of duty” of two or three years with his previous law firm White & Case. Five years later he was headhunted by M&A specialists Skadden Arps to develop the firm's European practice from scratch and has stayed on ever since.
As the partner in charge of Skadden's European offices, his work includes a broad range of transactions in the capital markets area. Buck represents both European and non-European clients in a full range of crossborder financing transactions, generally in connection with equity offerings or high-yield and other debt financings.

Chelsea FC

Buck’s involvement with Chelsea began through his position as European head of the American law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. Skadden Arps specialises in mergers, acquisitions and capital market transactions, and Buck had personally done legal work on a number of acquisitions for the Russian company Siberian Oil, through which he came to advise Russian-Israeli billionaire Roman Abramovich, formerly the majority shareholder in Sibneft.
The £140 million acquisition of all of the outstanding shares of the London Stock Exchange-listed company Chelsea Village plc was his first experience of taking over a football club.