Client profile: Sarah Davis, Guardian Media Group

The media lawyer talks about the diversity of London’s workforce and the handling of that Snowden story.

When interviewing for the client profile, in-house counsel will often list a slew of generic corporate M&A deals when citing what they consider ‘interesting work’. Guardian Media Group (GMG)’s longstanding group commercial legal director, Sarah Davis, is an exception to this.

Davis, alongside director of editorial legal services, Gill Phillips, oversaw one of the group’s most controversial exposés, that being the story of former CIA employee, Edward Snowden, leaking classified information from the US National Security Agency in 2013, on mass surveillance and government secrecy.

Advising the board on legal issues and potential corporate liability, Davis says: ‘It was a hugely interesting piece of work. Only a small group were aware of the story before it was published. We treated it with the utmost seriousness but it was business-as-usual and the proper process was followed.’

In one of the most unusual episodes in the history of digital-age journalism, having been threatened with legal action by the government, a senior editor destroyed computer hard drives containing copies of some secret files leaked by Snowden at the newspaper’s headquarters while being watched by technicians from UK Government Communications Headquarters. Davis was not in the building at the time as it was all ‘very organised’.

The British government placed pressure on the paper’s journalists, detaining David Miranda, the partner of Glenn Greenwald who led The Guardian’s US reporting on the files, at Heathrow airport. Then editor Alan Rusbridger was called to give evidence before the home affairs select committee over the impact of the NSA leaks.

Davis, who met with film producer Harvey Weinstein to discuss a potential film deal over the Snowden affair, says: ‘It was fascinating, the spectacle of the editor being required to give evidence to a select committee and asked if he loved his country…the journalist’s boyfriend who was arrested… it threw up sinister things about workings of the establishment, the government, and if you set them out of context it makes you look like a conspiracy theorist. But this is a journalist’s partner being arrested under a terrorism Act for something that has nothing to do with terrorism and what the Act was designed for.’

No stranger to contentious media work, Davis cut her teeth as a solicitor at Stephens Innocent (now Howard Kennedy) from 1991 until 2000, starting as an outdoor clerk, then training in intellectual property litigation and as a licensing specialist. Her first big case was a dispute over the 1989 British short film, Visions of Ecstasy, the only work to be refused a certification by the British Board of Film Classification on the grounds of blasphemous libel. Going all the way to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg in 1995, Davis recalls: ‘It was extraordinary because although I was supervised I was completely thrown in at the deep end.’

Following a brief stint at technology company, NDS, now part of Cisco Systems, where she managed contracts and global licensing work, she joined GMG as a commercial lawyer in 2001. Enjoying an audience of over 130 million monthly unique browsers and the UK’s largest quality news brand, reaching 23.8 million monthly unique visitors across print, desktop and mobile, Davis is tasked to deal with myriad issues for the business, including corporate M&A in the UK and US, IP expertise, media policy, ownership and plurality, licensing solutions for content creators and users, and digital media publishing and distribution. And indicative of the widening scope of general counsel responsibility, she further handles regulatory and compliance issues, competition law, social media, privacy and data protection, advertising, sponsorship and promotions. With a legal spend of an estimated £300,000, Davis now oversees a six-lawyer corporate commercial team, including one trainee who previously served as Davis’s personal assistant. The team also works closely with the editorial side of legal, run by the high-profile Phillips, as well as a standalone procurement team. With such limited resources to hand, Davis says being connected to the business is key to forging a successful career in-house: ‘The remit and perception of in-house lawyers has changed beyond recognition. A successful in-house team is not just simply an adjunct in your system. You must be part of the organisation and have the advantage of being core to so many things that you can act as the connective tissue. My friend James Ormrod, general counsel and company secretary for Mitie Group, told me that and it’s stood me in good stead. It’s one of the ways the role has changed, you have to be integral. You have to get involved.’

Davis is also an advocate for high-stakes, corporate-facing, in-house counsel, ‘otherwise your input would only get so far. That feels superficial, you’re not driving the solution for the business. It makes sense to be part of that process. Lawyers are well versed in speaking for themselves. I’m always cautious of legal advice going through somebody else. Corporate-facing roles are very important’.

GMG’s legal team deals with a vast array of editorial and commercial issues, including publishing an article on the News International phone-hacking scandal in 2011 on the revelation of the hacking of murdered teenager Milly Dowler’s phone; and news of the secret collection of telephone records held by Barack Obama’s administration in June 2013. A restructure of the GMG business in recent years also saw the $45m sale of Manchester Evening News to Trinity Mirror in 2010; its radio business, which included the Real Radio and Smooth Radio networks, to Global Radio for £70m in 2012; and the £600m, 50% stake sell-off of car classified brand Auto Trader to private equity house Apax Partners last year.

Davis turns to a mixed bag of external advisers, including Greenberg Traurig Maher, Bristows, Cooley, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Olswang and more recently, Baker & McKenzie. Operating an informal set up with those she has longstanding contact with, Davis says firms understanding the GMG business is pivotal for relationships to work. ‘It’s quite off putting when a firm isn’t prepared to give you the advice you need. There can be a bit of a dance where they don’t want to but it’s about being directive and providing a solution; the advice just facilitates that. It’s challenging working with lawyers who feel that way because there’s no value in that. Luckily, that’s not our law firms’ approach. From my time in private practice, there was a thinking which was: you give the advice, you don’t make the decision. They don’t want to be blamed. If they’re not comfortable or prepared to change that, there’s not much in it for us.’

And as acting governor at the University of East London, another issue important to Davis is diversity. There has been a clear consensus emerging from buyers of legal services in the last five years who are increasingly willing to make a lack of female and ethnic representation a significant part of the procurement process, which is in part driven by higher female composition in senior roles in-house compared to private practice. Davis says: ‘What personally upsets me is you look at the City of London – the colour of the City changes during the course of the day. At 6am, people from ethnic minorities are heading to clean offices, by 8am it’s people heading to work in them. The diversity in London is egregious. It’s so stark. It’s unpleasant. Organisations become more global, the work pool changes. The younger work force have real different expectations. Being in-house there is a chance for greater diversity because you’ve got different parts of an organisation, maybe it’s slightly easier. Law firms are homogeneous in that everyone is doing the same sort of job. Culturally, in-house organisations are more sophisticated about flexibility and diversity because they see the demands coming from various parts of the business. But there is an awful long way to go.’

As the media industry continues to undergo immense globalisation, as well as the influence of social media coupled with scrutiny over the question of press regulation, Davis says it provides the perfect breeding ground for business-savvy in-house lawyers. ‘In media we consider ourselves lucky with the constant change, the need to [be] innovative, be up to speed, and stay aligned to the business, and to serve in the right way. We need to make sure of that, and think constantly about how we deliver what we do. Businesses are too siloed. There will be a desire to converge functions. We’re already seeing it with junior lawyers where you’ve got people with other skill-sets. You have to be a lawyer and something else. A future general counsel will have to be that.’

sarah.downey@legalease.co.uk