About Ido Magen

I qualified as a lawyer in Israel in 2012, after a law degree completed with honours and a traineeship at one of the country’s largest commercial firms. I began in commercial and white-collar litigation at a specialist boutique, which is a useful place to start: you spend your first years watching, in forensic detail, what happens to commercial relationships when they fail.

What followed was deliberately varied. I moved to the legal department of the investment division of a major Israeli insurance group, working on financial and real-estate investments in Israel and abroad, including investments into technology and fintech companies. I then became deputy to the general counsel of an international industrial group producing polymer and colour compounds for the plastics industry, with dozens of manufacturing sites across Israel, China, the United States, Europe and South America — where I led acquisitions of competing companies and plants, and advised the chief executive and senior management.

From there I became deputy to the chief legal counsel of a NASDAQ-listed consumer products group, later acquired by a global beverage company. That role covered privacy, complex procurement, cross-organisational projects, and engagement with government, tax and competition authorities around the world. It also put me across the table from the largest retail chains on earth, negotiating the agreements that determine whether a consumer product succeeds in a market or quietly disappears from the shelf.

Most recently I served as legal counsel and Head of Business Development at an artificial intelligence startup — the point at which I stopped being only a lawyer — and as group general counsel of a private-equity-backed enterprise software group.

Across all of it, one pattern kept repeating. The decisions that actually mattered were never purely legal and never purely commercial. They were both, they were urgent, and they were made by people whose reasoning was not always the reasoning they gave out loud. That is why I trained as a Jungian coach, and it is why I now practise the way I do.

Today I advise independently, under the name Magen Strategy. I work with founders building something new, with owners moving into territory they do not know, and with companies in the middle of something complicated. I keep the practice deliberately small, because the value of what I do depends on my knowing the client’s business properly.