Waterstones general counsel Elisabeth Sullivan has left her position after less than a year, today (22 September) announcing she has taken the inaugural GC role at Efficio Consulting.
Efficio Consulting is a global management consultancy with offices across Europe, America and the Middle East. In a LinkedIn post today, Sullivan said she would assume her new position next week, and quipped: ‘So long, Waterstones: thanks for all the books!’
Speaking to Legal Business, Sullivan confirmed that she would emulate her role from Waterstones as a sole legal counsel: ‘Efficio seems like a great outfit: great people and they seem to have exciting plans for the future. It’s just me at present in the legal team, so I’m looking forward to scoping out and shaping their legal function going forward.’
Sullivan leaves Waterstones just nine months after she replaced previous GC Laila Aslam, but during her short stint she was able to transmit her philosophies on external counsel. In a Client Profile piece from February, Sullivan told Legal Business: ‘It’s crazy how often you’ll see a law firm just go off on a frolic where you’ve been very clear with them that they only need to look at something for a few hours and produce some bullet points. I try to be really clear with people that I want something quick and dirty so they don’t end up spending too much time and wasting the budget.’
In other in-house news, earlier this month 10x Banking GC Richard Given departed to take the group GC role at fintech platform OpenPayd. Given had originally joined the fintech-driven banking platform 10x Banking in 2017, arriving from HSBC where he was head of legal for worldwide operations and deputy GC.