Client profile: Maaike de Bie, Royal Mail Group

The new group general counsel on handling a recently privatised 500-year-old institution.

Royal Mail’s group general counsel (GC) Maaike de Bie likes to do things a little differently. Originally from the Netherlands, de Bie was the first person to arrive at Canada’s McGill University having never studied in English before. She then relocated to New York, completed the New York Bar and joined White & Case in the early 1990s, and says she was the first foreigner working there as a US associate. In some ways it is unsurprising that the international lawyer has found herself at the helm of a British institution still in the throes of a transition from long-time government-owned entity to public limited company.

‘I joined Royal Mail in January 2014, after the IPO in October 2013. I have always liked change and challenge. This is a company celebrating its 500-year anniversary this year, yet has only been a plc for less than three. The type of work we are now seeing is far more complex and difficult than the team has had to face before.’

De Bie first went in-house in 1999 when she was headhunted to work for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development after becoming disillusioned with private practice. Her role involved working alongside banking professionals structuring, negotiating and implementing numerous finance transactions in the public sector in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as ensuring compliance with the bank’s mandate and policies.

‘It was a very interesting experience in the late 1990s,’ she recalls. ‘I joined right after the Russia crisis happened and so there was a lot going on. The Balkan war was over: we were working in environments where the law did not always exist or if it did, it wasn’t applied or enforced. It was very much in line with how I like to work – thinking on your feet, being innovative and different rather than following a process already set in stone. From a lawyer’s perspective that was a really great learning experience because I started to realise that for all those hours we spend drafting perfect contracts, it is hardly ever the words that save a deal. It is all about leverage, negotiation and positioning.’

‘I joined right after the Russia crisis happened. The Balkan war was over: we were working in environments where the law did not always exist or if it did, it wasn’t applied or enforced.’

After six years, de Bie took her first GC role at GE Commercial Distribution Finance where she successfully managed the business through two major reorganisations before being promoted into the headquarters of GE Capital in Europe. It was here where she first met her future boss and her predecessor as Royal Mail’s GC, Neil Harnby.

Handling a lot of legal work around anti-bribery and corruption, de Bie left GE for a relatively short stint at Ernst & Young, where she was responsible for all matters relating to risk and governance before joining Harnby at Royal Mail as deputy GC in 2014.

‘Eighteen months after leaving GE I got a phone call – would I be interested in applying for the role to become deputy GC at Royal Mail? Because I knew Neil that helped, as I wouldn’t have been as keen moving from a financial services background to an industrial about to go through an IPO. It was a big step but very interesting to be responsible for a big team, a big budget and a big turnaround.’

After Harnby’s departure in September 2015, de Bie was appointed acting group GC, becoming group GC officially in April 2016. While serving as deputy, de Bie was responsible for the transactional side of the portfolio, but says the transition to the lead role felt natural.

‘Neil and I worked closely together and so as well as dealing with the transactional side, I was also responsible for the people and operational elements of it, as well as running the budget and the panel.’

More recently she says the team has been largely focused on dealing with the technology overhaul currently taking place at Royal Mail following years of under-investment by the government in the digital infrastructure.

‘There has been a significant procurement exercise – two years ago we concluded the biggest procurement in Europe on technology, as we changed from an outsourcing model to a hub-and-spoke model with Royal Mail in the middle. Under the outsource model, we only had a small IT department, which was expanding rapidly, so from the legal perspective there was a lot of work in that. With the way we do deals and transactions now, technology is at the heart of everything. That is completely new.’

And it is not just the IT infrastructure: the legal team is also grappling with modernisation. There are currently 30 lawyers in the legal team at Royal Mail who sit in a wider group legal and compliance function of around 70 people, which also includes accidents and claims handling. De Bie is now in expansion and restructuring mode after benchmarking exercises with other GCs, and the use of legal e-billing and matter management software Serengeti Law (now known as Legal Tracker) showed that the balance between in-house and external counsel was not quite right.

‘The legal team are a new team, a lot of them have joined in the last four or five years – deliberately so. We can easily take on more junior people to help us with a lot of the work that we currently outsource,’ she says.

She notes that the team (which was named In-House Team of the Year at the 2015 Legal Business Awards) has changed significantly and is effectively a microcosm of what is happening in Royal Mail generally. Harnby and de Bie have in recent years needed to bring into the team people with experience of working in-house in a private sector environment. The move away from the public sector has ushered in a new attitude – de Bie says the team speaks in terms of risk, which is new, and has started to negotiate on fees with law firms.

‘The team wasn’t as financially literate as it needed to be, so we centralised the legal budget, trained our team who outsource work, built new processes and right-sized our panel arrangements.’

‘The team wasn’t as financially literate as it needed to be, so we centralised the legal budget, trained our team who outsource work, built new processes, right-sized our panel arrangements and brought in an e-billing tool. We are in a much better place now with control over our legal spend. Before the IPO, Royal Mail’s key focus was about delivering your mail and doing that incredibly well. We now have different stakeholders and we have to overlay this with being more efficient, and continuously reducing costs, which is a real challenge.’

De Bie completed Royal Mail’s first post-IPO panel in 2014 with the director of legal operations Sarah Barrett-Vane, appointing a total of 15 firms, including Slaughter and May, Addleshaw Goddard, CMS Cameron McKenna, DLA Piper and Herbert Smith Freehills for an initial three-year period with a maximum two-year renewal. De Bie says she is very happy with how the panel is working and has no plans for any review.

She adds: ‘Most firms will have competition in that portfolio and that is helpful, especially for bigger pieces of work where we tend to do mini-tenders. As a result firms don’t get too comfortable and automatically think they get the work – we keep them on their toes.’

While the legacy of a government-owned Royal Mail still looms large, for de Bie heading up the legal team of a large company in flux – the Royal Mail has 140,000 employees in the UK alone, as well as 50,000 vehicles and 2,000 properties – means the focus is on where the business is going in the future. There are unique challenges, with the commercial pressures of a declining mail market, a universal service obligation (under the Postal Services Act 2011) and a fiercely competitive parcel delivery market all set against the significant cultural shift in adapting to working in a private sector environment.

De Bie concludes: ‘We don’t have all the processes in place. The technology is definitely improving, but a lot of the tools one might expect in a professional services firm are just not here. That is also the beauty of it: the Royal Mail is a great place to work if you want to add value and be part of the change. It is the opposite of a nine-to-five, predictable job.’

kathryn.mccann@legalease.co.uk