Vincent Cordo
Shell
Team size: 30
Major legal advisers: Allen & Overy, Baker McKenzie, Clifford Chance, Eversheds Sutherland, Norton Rose Fulbright, Reed Smith
Appropriate fee arrangements (AFAs) are now used on 100% of Shell’s new external instructions. The overall average for AFAs – including all legacy matters – teeters between 80-85%. For context, fellow institutional heavyweight Barclays still billed on hourly rates for nearly half of its external matters as recently as 2018.
The man credited with driving much of this change is Vincent Cordo, first hired from Reed Smith back in 2015 as a global sourcing officer and since 2018 Shell’s central legal operations officer. Shell’s legal director, Donny Ching, credits Cordo with transforming its approach to AFAs.
‘The death of the billable hour can happen in all functions if people can manage and understand and appreciate the levels of seniority needed to do certain projects,’ Cordo comments. ‘Then you can bid things out and say how much you think something’s worth: right now the industry’s a little too lopsided by asking the vendors, the firms or alternative legal service providers, “What do you think it costs?” We need more data evidence to say, “Well, here’s what we know it costs.”’
That is achieved by setting key performance indicators and tracking metrics, such as whether a firm has delivered on time and budget; how partners are interacting with teams to get that done; diversity and inclusion statistics; and what the end result of a matter was. Shell also tracks and reports how many matters are going to a firm in any particular location so that it can forecast working with firms in regions where they might currently have spare capacity.
‘The death of the billable hour can happen in all functions if people can understand the levels of seniority needed to do certain projects.’
Shell has six firms on its global panel and intends to send a greater volume of work to those firms – barring any conflicts or mobility issues – following a look at working arrangements, with the outcome of a panel review expected in the next few months. In doing so, Shell expects to derive greater value and efficiencies by investing more in the relationships. ‘Costs shouldn’t just be based on what we spend but also on what it would have cost for our talent to do it as well, if we had infinite knowledge,’ Cordo comments. ‘That’s how you’re going to get to a sweet spot.’
Some of the more innovative pricing arrangements that Cordo – who leads an operations team of 30 with several pricing analysts – has introduced with panel firms include tying discount models to the oil price. A base oil price is set and if it goes below certain thresholds, Shell receives a volume level of discount to its AFA. Conversely, firms can earn back discounts as the price of crude increases. To keep it simple, the market price is looked at regularly at an agreed time every month.
‘There’s countless ways to look at pricing and firms need more assistance from clients, but firms also need to be more open because they still have the obstacle of immediate yearly payout,’ Cordo says. ‘So when we ask for that investment, there’s the challenge of: “when do we get the payout?” But that is where I’m seeing things evolve – you can get as creative as possible but need to maintain credibility with firms and the equity partners about what sort of risk appetite they have.’
Pearson
Team size: 115
Major legal advisers: Charles Russell Speechlys, DLA Piper, Fieldfisher, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Herbert Smith Freehills
The general counsel (GC) and chief legal officer of Pearson, Bjarne Tellmann, has been on a sustained drive to more than halve his in-house legal department’s fixed costs over five years, achieving a reduction of close to 60%. Notably, his legal and compliance team’s headcount has dropped from 220 in 2014 to 115 today.
More recently, however, Tellmann led the setting up of a Transaction Services Centre, developed with external provider Morae Global, which provides internal and external resources for commercial transactions across Pearson’s businesses in North America, the UK, Australia, South Africa and India. He says this has improved standard processes, workflow and templates, and provides common technology platforms for legal services worldwide. ‘It’s moved us from being a distributor of inefficient models to one that is highly efficient. It also frees people up to do more strategic work.’
Tellmann has also set up what he calls a ‘special ops’ pool of small teams of professionals who can deliver services in a more agile way, rather than going externally to law firms or using alternative service providers for additional support. Volunteers from across the legal department are also given the opportunity to work on different projects, encouraging further collaboration. Associate GC for technology and strategy, Robert Mignanelli, was appointed to oversee a legal operations team, with Tellmann’s vision to create a four-tier structure – legal operations co-ordinating in-house lawyers, external law firms and alternative service providers – getting closer to reality with the appointment of an alternative service provider panel this year.
Pearson’s legal team also operates according to three tenets: do the right thing, have each other’s backs and be innovative. It has therefore introduced a number of initiatives regarding culture. One is Ethos, a culture group comprised of people from across the legal department, which allows junior team members to sit in on leadership meetings and report discussions to their colleagues and improve transparency. Another is Bravo, a reward and recognition system allowing anyone in the legal department to nominate colleagues for an on-the-spot reward of $100. Finally, Elevate is an internal mentoring programme in action since 2019, covering 50 people across five continents.
A culture code was also introduced to guide behaviour: ‘That’s designed to let everyone know what our values and beliefs are and how they reflect who we are,’ says Tellman. ‘The biggest challenge with all the change we have gone through has been in managing that change.’
Mike Woodfine
DXC Technology
Team size: 90
Major legal advisers: Bird & Bird, Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, Eversheds Sutherland, Kemp Little, Shoosmiths, Simmons & Simmons
Redesigning a legal team so that it can deliver services to support a B2B IT services provider operating in a competitive market is no easy task. As cloud-based consulting continues to disrupt the way in which IT companies provide client services, DXC Technology’s legal department decided it needed to embrace new technology to get to market faster.
For the legal team, this has led to a mass overhaul. The company’s vice president for legal, Mike Woodfine, has spent the last year and a half leading on a digital strategy to transform the legal department to be more agile and innovative’.
The result has been a partnership to deliver legal services between the in-house legal team at DXC and alternative provider UnitedLex. Woodfine’s 90-strong team in the UK now works within UnitedLex, providing legal and commercial services as one DXC legal team.
Legal consultant Leigh Dance comments: ‘Woodfine’s legal team is going through the most disruptive digital change I’ve seen and he’s right at the forefront of it and the leader of a whole new strategy for getting to market faster.’
‘Mike Woodfine’s legal team is going through the most disruptive digital change I’ve seen and he’s right at the forefront.’
Woodfine is in charge of managing a service, now, as much as managing a team. His legal advisory panel has had to adjust to its partnership with an alternative legal provider and get used to working more virtually. ‘The work that is going to UnitedLex relates to transaction and contractual commercial services, and we’ve created an innovative, high-performing strategic partner law firm panel for additional, discrete legal advice.’
With just ten members of staff retained in-house, some of the DXC legal team have also been offshored to UnitedLex delivery centres in Sofia, Manchester and Bangalore. ‘We’ve stratified and transformed our legal department by moving work to the most appropriate resource according to complexity and value. Overall, we have reduced our cost by about 30% and moved from fixed to variable costs, giving us more flexibility on budgeting.
The next stage is to move to digital contracting, while Woodfine says partnering with UnitedLex has given the legal team valuable access to technology it might otherwise have struggled to secure budget for, such as AI, analytics and contract management systems.
‘We’re seeing the commoditisation of contract law in areas of technology services. We’ve adapted our contract methodology to achieve a balanced position, which allows us to move to digital contracting and accelerate the company’s speed to revenue.’
Chris Grant
Barclays
Team size: 800
Major legal advisers: Addleshaw Goddard, Allen & Overy, Ashurst, Baker McKenzie, Clifford Chance, Dentons, Linklaters, Pinsent Masons, Simmons & Simmons, TLT, White & Case
The lack of innovation from law firms has long plagued the industry and Barclays’ head of relationship management, Chris Grant, wants to change that. His focus is on driving change in the behaviour of law firms and teaching them about what innovation looks like, all with the ultimate goal of providing better service: ‘The law firm partnership structure doesn’t lend itself to helping innovation happen,’ he comments.
As such, Barclays has established an innovation consortium with around 30 law firms, which includes some not on Barclays’ panel. The aim is to encourage engagement and collaboration, while at the bank’s quarterly relationship meetings, law firms are asked what they are doing to innovate.
‘It was so telling to see 30 different firms with 30 different views as to what they thought innovation was, versus what they could be doing and how they could be managing it,’ Grant says. ‘Everybody is so closely guarded and hesitant about sharing knowledge which may lead to losing competitive advantage. But we’re saying the competitive advantage doesn’t come from innovation and technology – it’s what you do with that to then improve the service that you provide that differentiates.’
‘We’re part of the business. We need to run legal as a business – that’s why we have legal operations.’
Grant, who was second in command to Barclays’ respected former head of external engagement, Stéphanie Hamon, before she left for Norton Rose Fulbright, set up the consortium as a part of Barclays’ final panel review exercise in 2018. In the same year, the bank launched its own legal technology incubator space as part of its network of 25 Eagle Labs: a 20-resident law tech incubator in London’s Notting Hill.
The programme was backed by 13 law firms and several other industry players including the Law Society, PwC, start-up community Legal Geek, as well as the University of Liverpool and University College London. It followed a handful of firms, such as Allen & Overy and Mischon de Reya, in opening such a space but was the first from the in-house side. Pinsent Masons partner Lucy Shurwood comments: ‘Chris is driving technology adoption by the legal team and the innovation agenda within Barclays’ legal team. He’s hot on innovation in legal and on the venture side in supporting start-ups and collaborating across clients, start-ups and law firms.’
Barclays also launched LawTech Bridge, alongside technology incubator CodeBase, as a series of meet-ups for those interested in the industry. The overall aim of this and the Eagle Lab initiative is to facilitate collaboration between legal tech start-ups, experts and law firms. ‘We’re successfully building an ecosystem in an environment where there’s a lot of interest in innovation and growing and changing the legal industry but there’s challenges to making it happen – law firms are not changing,’ Grant comments. ‘Some of the bigger ones may find it more difficult to change, but we are collaborating with a new cohort of partners to drive industry change and are refining the Lab’s partnership model to do this.’
He says the focus on technology and innovation was born out of the bank’s need to improve its operating model and have more certainty on cost, with Barclays’ overhaul of its adviser relationships understood to have saved the bank tens of millions of pounds. ‘We’re part of the business. We need to run legal as a business – that’s why we have legal operations.’
Wendy Hardaker
Government Legal Department
Team size: 192
Major legal advisers: Bevan Brittan, Browne Jacobson, Burges Salmon, DAC Beachcroft, Dentons, DLA Piper, Eversheds Sutherland, Fieldfisher, Gowling WLG, Hogan Lovells, Linklaters, Mills & Reeve, Pinsent Masons, PwC, Simmons & Simmons, Slaughter and May, TLT, Womble Bond Dickinson
Wendy Hardaker has radically overhauled the Government Legal Department’s service delivery model in the six years she has been commercial law director. The department has more than doubled headcount to 192 staff in that time and its adviser panel was slashed from nearly 50 firms to just 18. In doing so, she has dramatically reduced external legal costs.
Hardaker is credited with both remodelling and modernising the relationship between government and its law firm advisers too. In 2017, this saw more than 30 firms cut from its commercial panel and the number of lots reduced from eight to two, covering general legal advice services (GLAS). She says proper relationship management has allowed the government to leverage its buying power to receive value-added services ranging from free legal advice to event hosting and business analysis. Her department breaks down into 164 lawyers and 23 business management staff, with five people leading on panel relationship management.
TLT partner and head of commercial services Bill Hull comments: ‘Her unique approach to managing the government’s GLAS legal advisers – one of the most significant panels in the UK in terms of spend – has driven significant value-adds, including demanding much more engagement and improving collaboration between the firms.’
‘Wendy Hardaker’s unique approach to managing the GLAS legal advisers – one of the most significant panels in the UK – has driven significant value-adds.’
Hardaker adds: ‘It’s about getting the balance between competitive tension and partnership right by promoting the appropriate use of direct awards, mini competitions and alternative fee arrangements.’
She has simultaneously grown her team and the share of legal work undertaken outside of London, with the commercial law group one of the biggest and most geographically-dispersed squads of government lawyers, including teams in Bristol, Leeds and Manchester. Last year, Hardaker also introduced a commercial lawyer trainee scheme, with the first cohort of nine trainees starting in September 2019, while inclusion is a focus for 2020, with the legal team already split 44:56 male to female, having 24% BAME representation, 7% disabled and 5% LGBT.
An updated strategy to 2024 sets the goal of unifying its delivery even further to be ‘greater than the sum of our parts. We responded to the enormous EU exit challenges, for example, by joining our collective legal resources in a much more effective and joined up way than would have been possible previously’, she comments. ‘A challenge has been building a mutually-beneficial partnership with our general legal advice services panel during a period where political change and Brexit have meant that legal work pipelines have been inevitably uncertain.’
Adam Khan
Shell
Team size: 16 people
Major legal advisers: Allen & Overy, Baker McKenzie, Clifford Chance, Eversheds Sutherland, Norton Rose Fulbright, Reed Smith
Adam Khan, a global legal lead lawyer for Shell Retail, wanted to find a better way of sales contracting to put the customer first, preserve customer relationships, and make the process faster and fairer, while avoiding lengthy negotiations over hefty contracts and terms. The answer was to make the thousands of Shell’s sales contracts simple, accessible and fairer to the parties’ commercial positions, using plain language, clear formatting, and visual descriptions of the terms and conditions. ‘Customer account managers spend time trying to get that first sale and you don’t want lawyers unpicking that relationship,’ comments Khan.
The concept is as simple as using images, like a barge or a ship, when explaining delivery of marine lubricants, for example, to illustrate terms in a contract. Acknowledging that not everybody reads a contract in English, using images in contracts has also helped speed up the transaction time. ‘Using images does not turn contracts into comic books. It’s illustrative, like a newspaper. If you look at our marine terms and conditions, it’s clear who does what – we can write that down and we do. It’s always a complex question for legal to establish when ownership [of a product] has transferred.’
‘Using images does not turn contracts into comic books. It’s illustrative, like a newspaper. It’s clear who does what.’
Khan, however, does not get excited about the novelty of his picture-contract idea: it is a back-to-basics method of making contracts more customer-centric and easier to understand, while cementing business relationships. The project has absorbed much of Khan’s time over the past year and has already seen more than 150 contracts in Shell’s marine business become illustrative. Putting the contracts in plain English and reforming their layout was a crucial first step in redesigning the legal agreements.
‘The idea came about because I had a lot of customer feedback that said our agreements were too long,’ he comments. ‘Clauses have been condensed into short summaries in side bars within the contracts and there is more space on the page for ease of reading. It’s about chopping up bits of the contracts for the best audience.’
Proving a success so far, Khan is now working to roll graphic contracts out this year in other parts of Shell’s global commercial business, such as specialities and lubricants. ‘It’s not just lawyers who look at contracts,’ Khan says. ‘They are the living embodiment of relationships and contracts are supposed to hold a mirror up to what goes on in practice, because sometimes they can get a bit divorced from what we’re trying to do.’
Steven Lewis
CBRE
Team size: 18
Major legal advisers: Accura, DLA Piper, Kennedys, Latham & Watkins
In 2018, Steven Lewis was not planning on staying at CBRE Global Workplace Solutions beyond the one-year contract that brought him in to try and turn around a struggling legal function. He agreed to stay on, however, provided he could attempt to fulfil a hefty ambition within the 18-strong legal team.
‘I said I’d stay on permanently if I could create an ambitious strategy and long-term performance goals for the legal team,’ says Lewis. ‘Large parts of the legal profession are incredibly resistant to change, especially when it comes to technology. They are stuck in 1992 listening to Simply Red on a CD player, but now we live in the Spotify age and I want my technology to be the very best.’
His first role in-house on a permanent basis, he has now been head of legal for EMEA for two years at the US commercial real estate firm’s workspace division, which provides facilities management, project management, advisory and transaction services to property occupiers. By this point Lewis had already garnered extensive experience of short-term contracting in company legal teams, including Barclays, Belron International and, more recently, the University of Law.
‘Large parts of the legal profession are stuck in 1992 listening to Simply Red on a CD player, but now we live in the Spotify age and I want my technology to be the best.’
With some cut-throat restructuring decisions to make in the legal team to improve operations – Lewis describes the first six months as a ‘tougher gig than I was warned it would be’ – he has since turned his attention towards embedding a contract management system (CMS) into the legal team to help it process the company’s high deal turnover. ‘We’ve had double-digit growth for many years, which presents all sorts of problems for support staff, but with planning and strategy it’s amazing what you can achieve. If you add little 1% changes together, it adds up year-on-year and then without realising it you’re in a different world of efficiencies and performance.’
Lewis works closely with the commercial team on many deals and contracts. Some stretch to more than 1,000 pages and are worth millions of pounds, with the AI-driven CMS improving the company’s handling of them. The result was to partner with tech provider Exigent, which needed the backing of a large corporate to raise its profile. ‘I was happy to be the guinea pig for CBRE and now this system removes the tyranny of the hunch. It also means legal and commercial can now produce data reports for the business.’
Lewis is described by the chief executive of innovation consultancy Hyperscale Group, Derek Southall, as ‘one of the best operators out there’. ‘He’s great at pioneering new models of delivery for contracts and has a visionary approach to technology. The company doesn’t shout that loudly but has completely remodelled how its contracts are delivered.’
DLA Piper partner Richard Norman adds: ‘He is very forward-thinking, dynamic and focused. He is keen to ensure his team is the best in-house team in Europe, which has required him to restructure and reorganise it entirely.’
BT
Team size: 330
Major legal advisers: Allen & Overy, Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, CMS Cameron McKenna Nabarro Olswang, DWF, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer
The in-house legal department at BT has been through a seismic shake-up over the past two years. First, group GC Sabine Chalmers joined from Anheuser-Busch InBev in April 2018, replacing the widely-admired Dan Fitz. Then, the leadership team was restructured to mirror the shape of the wider business before, finally, a high-profile managed services deal with newly-listed law firm DWF was unveiled.
The result has been a rejigged structure that frees up its lawyers for strategic work – 84% of low-value deals were managed by a legal process outsourcing team of 34 in Belfast and Wroclaw – and a 10% reduction in the total cost of legal for 2018/19 to about £70m. A team of 43 covering insurance and real estate work also switched to DWF on that five-year, multimillion-pound managed legal services arrangement.
The changes happened in two stages. GC reports were lined up with each of the business and corporate units: GC of corporate, Bruce Breckenridge; GC of technology, Chris Fowler; the GCs of each of the business units: consumer, Russell Johnstone; enterprise, Jeff Langlands; global, Liz Walker; Openreach, Nigel Cheek; company secretary Rachel Canham; and director of transformation, Dave Hart. Fowler had served as head of operations alongside his day job until Hart was promoted from litigation in 2019, following the completion of the DWF deal.
‘Phase two is working with the leadership team and their direct reports to further align the strategic priorities for the function and the business and how we want to deliver them,’ Chalmers comments. ‘There were a number of areas core to business in which we definitely require deep internal expertise and business partnerships. Then there are other areas that are less bespoke where a better way to deliver services and build careers for the talent involved, and take advantage of technology and best practices across different industries, was to partner with someone like DWF.’
Fowler was tasked with finding the right partner for the managed services deal and began by establishing the overall cost of BT’s function – there is just one budget for legal now, whereas as recently as 2017 there were six. BT also surveyed its internal customers at the executive committee, from which the feedback suggested legal’s accountabilities needed to be clearer and the service model consistent.
‘You can’t flirt with managed services, it’s a long-term relationship.’
The path to DWF took at least a year, assessing 26 potential providers before being whittled down to a shortlist of four. That included traditional law firms, New Law players and the legal arms of the Big Four accounting firms, as well as ‘consortium’ approaches between providers playing in each of those fields.
‘We spent a good part of 2018 engaging with people and understanding what it is they could offer, what they had now and where they were going,’ Fowler comments. ‘The biggest change we noticed was how certain firms engaged with us. Some were clearly embracing this as part of their strategy and some clearly weren’t, but what was most encouraging for me was that firms had clearly worked out they needed to modify and change their offerings.’
While still early days, Fowler says taking the time to properly establish the baseline cost data and the importance of constant communication are two of the key lessons he has learned: ‘You can’t flirt with managed services, it’s a long-term relationship.’
All of this has been led by changes in the wider business. In May 2018, BT announced plans to cut about 13,000 jobs over the next three years in a bid to save £1.5bn in costs. Then, a month later, chief executive Gavin Patterson surprisingly resigned after five years in the top job. His replacement, Worldpay’s former co-head of payment processing, Philip Jansen, took over in 2019.
Hart now leads a team of 15 tasked with building on Fowler’s foundation and dedicating full-time resource to the ‘transformation agenda’: the evolving opportunities for the function being brought by technology and alternative service providers, talent retention and management, and managing budgets. Having tidied in-house, a full panel review is the next order of business.
‘BT is in a constant state of change and probably will be for some time to come,’ Hart comments. ‘With that in mind, having somebody who is dedicated to helping manage that change and ensure the legal function has the right operating model and systems to be able to keep up with the changing demands of the business is now a full-time role.’
National Grid
Team size: 115
Major legal advisers: Addleshaw Goddard, Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, CMS Cameron McKenna Nabarro Olswang, Dentons, DLA Piper, Eversheds Sutherland, Herbert Smith Freehills, Linklaters, Shakespeare Martineau, Womble Bond Dickinson
More than 60 companies applied for a spot on National Grid’s panel, unveiled in late 2019 following an extensive tender process over six months. The review followed the trend of shrinking rosters, reducing the number of advisers from 12 to ten, with Womble Bond Dickinson the sole new appointee and BDB Pitmans, Irwin Mitchell and Norton Rose Fulbright losing their spots.
The review – for work understood to be worth about £12m a year in the UK alone – drew controversy for its implementation of a ‘pay-to-play’ process, which saw firms pay to compete for adviser spots, effectively covering the near-£2,000 cost of being ‘validated’ by a procurement company.
But National Grid has also garnered strong recommendations for the way it works with its panel firms, with global head of legal operational excellence Mo Ajaz described as ‘one of the leading lights in UK legal operations’ by Pinsent Masons director for client solutions, David Halliwell: ‘He’s very good with data and data analytics around how firms provide value – that’s how he stands out.’
Addleshaw Goddard head of infrastructure, products and energy group, Richard Goodfellow, adds: ‘It is one of the most thoughtful businesses in terms of how it engages with its panel. It has thought about how best to engage and give people work, and although value is critical, it understands it’s not the only criteria to use.’
Initiatives include reports that rank how firms compare – without naming the other firms – on areas such as providing training, allowing them to more easily stake a claim for work depending on their contribution. Group GC and company secretary Alison Kay says this arrangement puts all the emphasis on firms being pro-active about showing how they can add value: ‘We talk to the firms about how we expect transparency over cost and expect them to offer value add-on services, like legal automation.’
The reduction in advisers – National Grid had looked at going as low as six panel firms – was intended to preserve the competitive spirit between firms, says Kay, but also guarantee them certainty of work. Firms will still be expected to pitch for certain pieces of work, however.
The new contract began on 1 February 2020 for three years, with an option to extend for a further two years. The panel was previously extended in 2017 following the last full review in 2015. It features full services and specialist advice firms covering regulated and non-regulated property and planning, corporate services, as well as gas and electricity legal work.
‘In-house is tightening up what it wants from its lawyers and panels of modern times will need to become more fluid,’ Kay comments. ‘What we wanted to see five years ago is very different to what we want to see now. I want us to have a really small panel of core firms but more fluidity for niche regulatory work.’
Network Rail
Team size: 26
Major legal advisers: Addleshaw Goddard, Dentons, Eversheds Sutherland
Network Rail has attracted attention for ripping up the rule book on legal panel design to try to deliver on a vision for a more dynamic and collaborative relationship with firms.
Dan Kayne, GC for regions at the railway provider, led a panel review process that took the best part of two years to finalise in March last year and little attention to detail has been spared in trying to maximise the benefits to Network Rail.
Addleshaw Goddard, Dentons and Eversheds Sutherland gained spots in a reduced panel and have been allocated their own regional patches across the country, which Kayne says provides guaranteed flow of work for the firms and lets Network Rail compare firms’ performance for similar types of work in different parts of the country.
‘We don’t call it a panel – we call it a partnership. The move is about seeing law firms as service providers. We’re asking firms to lawyer differently and I want to change the perception of lawyers as blockers. There are many lawyers who enable good business decisions,’ says Kayne.
‘Our partnership principles are designed to exceed our customers’ expectations.’
A key performance indicator system has been introduced with financial incentives for law firms to help, among other things, measure the number of cases that are handled on alternative fee arrangements, with the intention of moving work away from the hourly rate. Providing maximum detail in case matter notes is another area firms are encouraged to do well on, while firms have been encouraged to sub-contract legal work if they lack expertise on an issue.
‘Our partnership principles are designed to exceed our customers’ expectations,’ stresses Kayne.
Beginning last April, Network Rail’s new legal partnership will run for five years to allow for the full benefits to be felt and processes tested, and Kayne has suggested there might be more radical changes from 2024.
A partner from a panel firm comments: ‘The legal team was brave and cut down its panel from five law firms to three, which is incredibly difficult for a quasi-public-private company to do given all its internal stakeholders.’