Biography of Kenneth Schneider
Renaissance Lawyer

Kenneth Schneider, the legal and financial prodigy
who rebuilt the legal and economic foundations of the former Soviet Union
following its disintegration, is rededicating these talents
to achieve ever-larger aims for the future.

Kenneth Schneider’s academic and professional career has seemingly included mastering everything from music and mathematics to philosophy and physics and from linguistics and law to education and economics in a path that blazing to, through and beyond the world’s leading educational institutions, professional firms, and power-broking entities. In fact, Ken Schneider throughout his life seems to have thrived by taking on the most complex challenges imaginable on scales larger than life itself: demonstrating intellectual virtuosity so unlimited that it can transcend fields, nations and cultures and bring them into new alignments with each other.

During Ken Schneider’s early period as an international financial attorney practicing with the world’s leading law firms in America and Europe, Schneider was handling headline transactions in more than 50 countries on all six inhabited continents. But, more importantly for all things to come, he was masterminding new ways of thinking about his own potential and the potential of others. As a result, Kenneth Schneider would literally rewrite history, a few years later, when he strategically agreed to dedicate these skills and ambitions to the revitalization of the former Soviet Union’s chaotically emerging economies at the turn of the millennium.

In 1993, Kenneth Schneider undertook an assignment to represent the Republic of Kazakhstan in rewriting their legal frameworks and negotiating foreign investment on a massive scale that would enable not only the economic but the social redevelopment of the nation. Given that Schneider, among his other hidden talents, was already fluent in Russian – and realizing that the Newly Independent States (NIS) of the former Soviet Union happened to occupy fully one-sixth of the Earth’s land surface and contained a quarter of virtually all of the world’s critical natural resources, Schneider followed this opening act with the bold move of actually relocating his practice to Moscow: the heart of the former Eastern Empire.

Thanks to that decision, Ken Schneider would go on to play a major role in changing the course of world history during the decade that followed. In the midst of this environment of pure dynamism, Schneider brought to bear his well-honed skills as a legal and financial virtuoso to rethink and reintegrate the old with the new, East with West, and to develop new paradigms on which the future economic progress of the NIS could be re-founded. In the years concluding the old millennium and beginning the new, Schneider marshaled his full spectrum of intellectual abilities and professional skills to redefine the very role of the intellect and of the professions in creating an era of unprecedented opportunity and transformation that would sweep across the NIS and ripple far beyond its boundaries.

In a series of monumental engagements impacting all of Eurasia from the Atlantic to the Pacific and the Arctic to the Indian Oceans, Ken Schneider did nothing less than redesign the legal and financial infrastructure of what had been the world’s largest empire. To achieve this, Schneider created a new fusion of emerging and mature market paradigms giving rise to new models for legal and financial professionals not only in the NIS and the developing world, but also in the world’s legal and financial centers where the original paradigms in which Schneider’s own education and training had been rooted were created.

Schneider represented the NIS super-region’s key movers and shakers, reshaping the region and reinventing its future, throughout its most important transformational phases: taking responsibility for the reorganization and recapitalization of huge segments of the planet’s resources and infrastructure while re-booting the NIS’s legal and financial systems with the first world-class legal and financial structures and transactions ever to take place there. For an American professional to become one of the most important participants in the largest series of social and economic transformations that the former Soviet Union ever saw was as historic in its significance as it was profound in its results. This blazing phoenix would soar to ever higher heights throughout Schneider’s tenure in Moscow first as prodigy and then as dean of this cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary academy of the world’s potential for a better future.

With the arrival of the new millennium, Kenneth Schneider would outdo even these accomplishments by moving out of the role of consultant-facilitator and into the role of principal-actor: becoming one of the founding members of Millhouse Capital. Within an amazingly brief time that stunned the financial world, Millhouse would have under management the largest collection of NIS assets ever assembled. With the opportunity to now work directly with the powers who had benefited so greatly from the new economic possibilities that Schneider had created, Ken Schneider was now in a position to reinvent the functioning of the NIS economies from the inside-out.

Schneider did nothing less than that: recreating the future of the NIS by rewriting its economic history. But having reached the highest heights of achievement in this realm, and with the NIS roaring to levels of prosperity and promise that it had never known before, Schneider stunned the professional world yet again by doing the unthinkable. He handed off to others this vast market that he had done so much to create and left the NIS: returning to his beloved academic life at Harvard University and rededicate all of his abilities and resources to his lifelong educational and philanthropic aims.

It’s been a mere half-decade since Ken Schneider’s ‘retirement,’ though surely it seems like an epoch. With no one to follow through on the vision for the future he had given his all to make possible, within just a few years of Schneider’s departure from the international financial scene it has been consumed in turmoil that sent the NIS and world economies into tailspins.

Enter Kenneth Schneider, again. Schneider has recently been spotted in high level meetings with movers and shakers (now mostly shakers) around America, Europe and Asia. Rumors abound that Ken Schneider is now re-emerging onto the world scene to repeat history by reinventing it yet again. Under the mantle of the Aurience Ltd. international consulting group, the maestro of the markets seems to be preparing to outdo himself yet again.

Studying the Aurience Ltd. website, www.AurienceLtd.com, one encounters nothing other than Kenneth Schneider’s hallmark patterns of intercultural synergy and timeless optimism: propounding the synergy of emerging and mature, East and West, and art and science into wholes far greater than the sum of their parts. The term ‘aurience,’ reportedly coined by Schneider himself, means ‘the golden path.’ That certainly seems an apt description of the destiny he challenges all of us to follow, and is hopefully a prediction of where we may yet be heading during the times to come...

About the Author

Richard Morrison is a journalist and a professional writer presently researching and writing about international leaders in culture and commerce, of which his present series of articles on Kenneth Schneider and Aurience Ltd. form a part.