Elspeth Vincent
Ecotricity
Team size: Three lawyers
Major legal advisers: Dentons, Lewis Silkin, TLT
Elspeth Vincent practises what she preaches: she cares about environmental sustainability, carving out a career as a renewables and environmental lawyer since 2008 before going in-house to ultimately become head of legal at green energy firm Ecotricity.
‘You really couldn’t be in my role with a silo mindset,’ says Vincent. ‘On any given day I might be dealing with a complex employment dispute, a corporate acquisition, and interpreting an agreement to buy gas in the wholesale European market.’
Ecotricity was one of the world’s first renewable energy suppliers when it was founded in 1996 and generates a substantial amount of its green energy supply instead of buying it on the market. The firm builds its own generation assets, like wind turbines and solar parks, supplying electricity and gas to around 200,000 domestic and business customers.
‘The challenge for me is helping the company get projects off the ground. We are planning to build a handful of subsidy-free generating assets this year.’
The company’s goal is to find new ways to bring the green agenda to business and commerce in what Vincent describes as a ‘politically harsh’ renewables environment. Cuts to renewable subsidies in the UK in recent years pose a challenge to the company’s asset-building model. ‘The challenge for me in this role is helping the company get these sorts of projects off the ground. We are planning to build a handful of subsidy-free generating assets this year. We are heavily involved in the early stages of structuring finance and we have to work hard to ensure the terms of the facility will work on a long-term basis.’
The legal team supports the company in putting its mouth where its money is, lobbying on climate change issues and partnering with organisations like Extinction Rebellion and anti-fracking campaigners.
The Osborne Clarke-trained Vincent has worked her way up the company, starting out as legal counsel in 2016, then senior legal counsel and finally head of legal in 2019: ‘I’m trying to roll out more sustainability within the legal team too and we’re working to kick the bucket of that paper-heavy legal department.’
Last year, Gloucestershire-based Ecotricity also launched a vegan food company, Devil’s Kitchen, which supplies plant-based food to schools and colleges around the UK, and unusually, the company also has its own professional football club, Forest Green Rovers, equipped with electric car chargers, solar panels and a solar-powered robot lawnmower.
Philip Aiken
Barclays
Team size: 30
Major legal advisers: Clifford Chance, Hogan Lovells, Pinsent Masons, Simmons & Simmons
‘The Mindful Business Charter (MBC)’s impact has surpassed my expectations. It won’t change workplace culture overnight, but it has created a dialogue about mental health in the workplace and steps people can take to reduce stress,’ says Philip Aiken, head of legal for regulated and unregulated lending at Barclays.
Aiken is the driving force behind MBC, a workplace mental health initiative for lawyers pioneered by Barclays alongside Pinsent Masons and Addleshaw Goddard.
Sending emails outside of work hours and not expecting staff on annual leave to be on call are some of the practices the initiative is trying to break down. With 35 organisations now signatories, split between in-house legal teams and private practice, Aiken says the project has taught him the importance of being brave, having conversations people would rather avoid about mental health and ignoring people who dismiss the initiative as unimportant. ‘Today’s health and safety laws have their genesis in our last great workplace revolution, being the industrial revolution where people were being physically injured at work. As our generation navigates the technological revolution, how are we going to stop colleagues from causing injury to their mental wellbeing at work when they have the tools and devices never to switch off from the workplace?’
‘The Mindful Business Charter won’t change workplace culture overnight, but it has created a dialogue about mental health in the workplace and steps people can take to reduce stress.’
‘The Mindful Business Charter won’t change workplace culture overnight, but it has created a dialogue about mental health in the workplace and steps people can take to reduce stress.’
While Aiken’s ambitions for the MBC continue – new rounds of signatories are announced every few months – he is looking to other areas of workplace wellbeing for legal, including gender ‘intelligence’ training designed to grow the number of women in senior positions. ‘Our gender intelligence programme is designed to increase the number of female colleagues in senior leadership positions in the legal function at Barclays beyond its current level of 43%. Gender intelligence looks at different behaviours from men and women, and how this can realise dominant workplace cultures. If we understand what our dominant workplace culture looks like, then we can work together to break this down.’
Clifford Chance UK co-head of corporate Melissa Fogarty praises Aiken: ‘He’s doing a tremendous amount in the space of mental health and wellbeing through the Mindful Business Charter and is a genuine diversity champion.’
Bank of England
Team size: 150
Major legal advisers: Ashurst, Clifford Chance, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Herbert Smith Freehills, Linklaters, Travers Smith
‘She’s at the top of a very interesting organisation at a very interesting time, given the bank’s role in navigating the issues concerning Brexit,’ Latham & Watkins partner Stuart Alford QC comments. ‘What’s interesting about her Bank of England (BoE) role is that it sits at the sharp end of the market – balancing the commercial needs of financial traders and banks with the BoE’s role as custodian of market ethics and financial stability. Striking the right balance requires a personality, judgement and a set of skills that not everybody has.’
Since 2015, general counsel (GCs) Sonya Branch has been charged with striking that balance. And, for much of that time, Brexit has dominated the UK central bank legal team’s workload: a major part of the 150-strong legal directorate has been involved since the mid-2016 referendum in reviewing about 10,000 pages of legislation and tracking 39 statutory instruments, to which it contributed drafting. That’s 6,000 pages of binding technical standards and 6,000 rules, all to make sure the UK financial services sector had a regulatory framework fit for purpose on the point of exit.
‘Because so much effort was put in upfront in preparing a revised legislative and regulatory framework, and so much contingency planning was done with firms and supporting supervising colleagues implementing those contingency plans, the Brexit process, as it happened, went as smoothly and effectively as one could have planned. But there is plenty of continuing preparation work for the end of the implementation period, which is now in action.’
While being at the forefront of Brexit’s impact on the economy, Branch has also brought significant change to BoE’s legal function with her One Legal Directorate strategy – nearly doubling headcount, streamlining a structure of nine legal units down to four alongside an EU withdrawal division and appointing two deputy GCs. Permanent paralegals have also been appointed for the first time, creating a structure whereby staff can join as a paralegal and move all the way up to GC, while the first three women have been appointed under the Women Returners scheme, which places people in work after extended career breaks.
‘It has effectively been a five-year project and involved so much change in such short measure. I had absolutely no metrics to be able to verify, for rational, enquiring, intellectually-engaged minds, why it was worth the effort,’ she comments. ‘I look back now and feel so incredibly grateful that colleagues had the trust to see it through.’
See interview with Sonya Branch
Ciaran Rooney
Eve Sleep and Rockley Photonics
Team size: Four
Major legal advisers: Baker Botts, Cooley, Mewburn Ellis, Norton Rose Fulbright, Stevens & Bolton
Ciaran Rooney has a rare position in that his expertise is spread across two separate businesses. More unusual, however, are his dual roles as GC of Eve Sleep, a mattress manufacturer, and as corporate development director at Rockley Photonics, a supplier of photonics chipsets.
Rooney, an ex-Cooley associate, joined former client Eve Sleep in April 2017, after which he joined Rockley – also a Cooley client. He became GC at Eve at the age of 30 following its initial public offering in May 2017 and, while at Rockley, Rooney and his team of three led on a $42m joint venture in China with a manufacturing company, as well as negotiating and structuring key commercial deals with partners and suppliers. He also mentors and advises various tech companies such as Krowd, Noahs Box, PitchMe and Collective Society from early stage to late stage on their fundraising strategies.
Cooley partner and former colleague Chris Coulter comments: ‘He is changing the paradigm of what it means to be a GC. He is a lawyer and an entrepreneur at the same time.’
‘Ciaran Rooney is changing the paradigm of what it means to be a GC. He is a lawyer and an entrepreneur at the same time.’
Rooney says his legal background is of huge benefit to both his roles: ‘Lawyers have to be able to distil complex problems into digestible and actionable advice and also be able to navigate ambiguity in the law in a way that manages risk. Those skills are very useful when supporting a CEO or CFO, pitching to an investor or explaining and discussing the complex commercial arrangements of a deal.’
The main challenge, however, is that both Eve and Rockley are fast-growth companies, although he believes his private practice experience helps, in that it is essentially akin to having two clients. Both companies are maturing and Rooney’s next 12 months are about moving from laying the foundations to supporting the businesses in getting the most out of the platforms they have now set down.
‘You have to be able to juggle multiple projects that may or may not be interrelated while keeping a clear head and focus on each piece,’ he says. ‘Both companies operate in very different sectors, but there are a lot of similarities in terms of scaling businesses, international operations and fundraising. At both I see my primary role as supporting the CEO and being a trusted adviser to them, often working on complex and fast-moving projects that are pivotal to the business.’
Unilever
Team size: 500
Major legal advisers: Baker McKenzie, Clifford Chance, CMS Cameron McKenna Nabarro Olswang, DLA Piper, Linklaters, Mayer Brown
In March 2019, a group of 65 GCs spanning major companies from the UK and Europe collectively signed a letter urging law firms to improve their diversity efforts. The letter was a commitment to promoting and valuing diversity in the legal profession and wider business community around gender, race, sexual orientation, disability, cultural background, religion and age.
Despite the industry’s track record favouring platitude over progress on such issues, this initiative was backed by a core team of five heavyweight GCs: Donny Ching at Shell, Rosemary Martin at Vodafone, Richard Price at Anglo American, Caroline Cox at BHP and Ritva Sotamaa at Unilever. Sotamaa, however, is credited with leading the charge.
A year later, the Unilever legal chief says there are now close to 100 company signatories to the letter, a website dedicated to the cause, and meetings between GCs and private practice in the pipeline to discuss diversity issues.
She comments: ‘The initiative has been received well and we’re going to be quite open with this. Our tone is very collaborative. We aren’t pointing fingers but recognising that we need to raise the bar across the industry.’
Although unveiled to much publicity almost a year ago, efforts have been kept low-profile since. In the background, however, representatives from a multitude of legal teams have been working together across organisations to find tangible solutions within law firms and in-house teams alike.
Surveys have also been completed to assess which diversity and inclusion initiatives people feel have worked best at their own organisations with the ultimate goal of establishing a menu of the top ten to 20 programmes and projects that have the most impact. Around 100 representatives, including GCs and senior partners, were due to meet in late February to share progress, with the creation of key performance indicators to measure progress being a key ambition.
‘We don’t have to build something new,’ she says. ‘A lot of work has already been done around this. We want this to be a challenge but not a burden to law firms and others.’
Sotamaa is as much of a stickler for diversity and inclusion awareness in her own workplace. She has been legal chief for seven years, managing a team of 500 staff within a global consumer goods giant that owns more than 400 brands sold across 170 countries. ‘We have people from ten different nationalities in my leadership team of 15, so it’s very diverse. In a team like ours, spread all over the world, the inclusion part becomes very important. How do you create a workplace where people feel they have a purpose?’
Much of her focus has been on retaining talent within the team: ‘People stay or leave organisations for a variety of reasons and we’re trying to be big on purpose and empowerment. We’re competitive on reward and we’ve looked hard at what makes people want to stay in an organisation.’
She was also instrumental in introducing an IT platform for the legal department, called Flex, which is designed to ‘break down barriers globally’ across the business by letting staff post for help on a project, or volunteer to work on a task. Flex has since been introduced in other parts of the business and more than 70% of Sotamaa’s team have been involved with Flex.
OVO Energy
Team size: Ten
Major legal advisers: CMS, Osborne Clarke, Slaughter and May, Travers Smith, Womble Bond Dickinson
OVO Energy has gone from a green energy start-up founded to challenge the UK’s Big Six providers to become the country’s third-largest supplier with five million customers in just a decade.
And the ink is barely dry on its most transformative deal yet – the £500m acquisition of Big Six provider SSE’s energy and home services business, adding 3.5 million of those customers and 8,000 staff. OVO had been valued at £1bn a few months before the deal, following investment from Mitsubishi Corporation.
‘We have had ten years of tremendous growth. It’s a real success story,’ group legal director Sanjay Verma comments. ‘The SSE deal gives us the platform to deliver the next generation of OVO to so many more people. We’re constantly thinking about structures we need to reflect the increasing maturity of the company, but at the same time we don’t want to lose the secret sauce – the entrepreneurial spirit, vision and speed that comes right from the top. We have got to strike a balance between maturing and not becoming too rigid.’
Verma joined OVO from Cognizant in May 2018, taking over from previous GC Daphne Yao as she moved into a chief of staff role with the company’s retail business. Since then, the company expanded internationally, including Spain, France and Australia, and a technology division called Kaluza was established, focused on using tech to intelligently connect devices and control energy consumption, and deliver back to the grid.
Throughout that time, the business operated with four lawyers, but has since expanded to ten after the SSE acquisition. Verma now has a group role overseeing all of OVO’s businesses and working on strategic projects, while Tom Coulson and Laura McVean manage the UK retail legal team. There is no formal external adviser panel, with Verma instead preferring to work with people that spend the time to understand OVO.
Verma says his lean legal team has had to adapt to moving at the same pace as the company generally, understanding the areas where it can use a lighter touch. He is focusing on integrating the SSE legal team over the next year, helping structure the right risk and compliance framework, as well as spending more time on international growth, working out what legal support those businesses need and how best to get it to them.
‘The team knows what’s right and what’s wrong, but also that what they had time to do last week, they might not have time for this week,’ he comments. ‘It’s about being super-efficient with your time and transferring knowledge into the teams we support – to empower them, but also because we’re not precious about anything. There are bright people everywhere and a lot of traditional “legal” tasks can be done by non-lawyers. That’s what’s keeping me here. There’s a tremendous wave of things that keep coming and you never quite know what’ll be next.’
Anna Suchopar
ASOS
Team size: 25
Major legal advisers: Lewis Silkin, Slaughter and May
Bereavement following the death of a close family member led to Anna Suchopar, interim GC at fashion giant ASOS, launching a series of one-day events for lawyers exploring difficult societal issues.
To get the ball rolling, Suchopar last year invited her legal advisers to an event dedicated to talking about mental health and sharing experiences at ASOS’s offices. Firms were invited to be introspective and think about mental wellbeing issues they might have in their firms through small group sessions. ‘Before people leave the session we ask them to commit to actions and we give them practical tools, like manager toolkits for spotting the signs that somebody is struggling,’ Suchopar says. ‘We decided that we wanted to use our power as buyers of legal services to talk to our lawyers about topics that are really important but that don’t often get the air time.’
Sean Dempsey, an employment partner at Lewis Silkin, comments: ‘Anna and her team encouraged the attendees to take forward their action points and report back to them with any developments that might be of interest to all of the attendees. I cannot think of an initiative more worthy of recognition than this.’
‘Most respondents thought the legal profession as a whole does have a diversity problem, but most thought that their own firms did not.’
The mental health talk followed the success of an earlier session that Suchopar – who took on the company’s top legal role on an interim-basis just under a year ago – initiated in 2018, looking at diversity and inclusion. Participants were surveyed about diversity in their legal teams and were asked to think about two questions: do law firms have a problem with diversity and do they have problems retaining a diverse workforce? The lawyers were then invited back to ASOS for a half a day to hear the findings of the data.
Says Suchopar: ‘We found that legal teams are balanced at the point of entry, but as people progress to partner, firms struggle to maintain diverse teams. Interestingly, most respondents thought that the legal profession as a whole does have a diversity problem, but most thought that their own firms did not.’
The plan is for the topic to be explored in a presentation every 18 months. ‘Unconscious bias training is important too – I made everybody in the legal team go through it and we were the first team within ASOS to complete it,’ she adds. ‘We are not trying to claim that ASOS’s legal team is perfect either, but the profession will be better if we’re all prepared to stand together and shine a light on the awkward topics.’
Kate Teh
Telegraph Media Group
Team size: Eight
Major legal advisers: Farrer & Co, Squire Patton Boggs
Kate Teh was well ahead of the curve ten years ago when she began developing an interest and specialism in data privacy issues while working at Telegraph Media Group. Teh, an M&A lawyer by background, has been legal director of the media group for 12 years and is one of its most senior lawyers.
‘Nobody was doing data work at The Telegraph ten years ago so I started taking up the reins on it and have become very involved with industry and regulators in this area,’ she says.
The unprecedented rise of the digital age has undoubtedly rendered Teh’s skillset invaluable as the likes of Facebook and Google continue to face intense scrutiny from regulators and data privacy activists over how they use personal data. The emergence of ‘ad-tech’, an industry devoted to technology that supports digital adverting on publishers’ websites, has thrown up its own challenges regarding the legally-compliant use of people’s data online by third-party advertisers.
‘Nobody was doing data work ten years ago so I started taking up the reins on it and have become very involved with industry and regulators in this area.’
Teh has become an active voice for more pronounced regulation in the advertising technology space to help control the misuse of data for the purposes of targeted adverting. She is a member of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Transparency and Consent Framework steering group. The industry initiative is trying to make digital advertising companies’ handling of personal data, through cookies and other tracking devices, compliant with GDPR. Teh also sits on the board of various media bodies, including NLA Media Access.
In response to calls for greater privacy controls, Google in January agreed to phase out third-party cookies, which can track users’ movements online, over two years.
Says Teh: ‘High-quality journalism is one of the foundations of our democracy that cannot be overstated, but it is under serious threat. As a lawyer, working for press sustainability and press freedoms in this challenging environment is something that really matters.’
Jane Clemetson, commercial legal director of competitor media group Reach, comments: ‘Kate is a very senior and well-respected lawyer. I work with her, as Reach’s representative, on a number of these initiatives and she is impressive.’
Inmarsat
Team size: 14
Major legal advisers: Bird & Bird, Clifford Chance, Fieldfisher, Jones Day, Steptoe & Johnson
The services sector makes up more than 70% of the EU’s gross domestic product. But due to what was seen as a fragmented approach to contracting services, the European Commission and European Free Trade Association in 2016 gave a mandate to the European Committee for Standardization to develop a standard for the three different phases of providing services: procurement, contracting and execution. Enter Christian Fahey, at the time a senior associate at Baker McKenzie but from late 2016 an in-house lawyer at satellite telecoms company Inmarsat.
‘The EU saw this as a big area where standardisation would be more effective than legislation,’ he comments. ‘My interest was in the contracting phases and asking: “What does a good contract look like?”’
Fahey has been involved from the start of the project, helping set up a working group ultimately tasked with establishing a non-binding standard for service contracts and involving input from more than 20 countries as to what constitutes best practice. Fahey, as an expert contributor and co-author, has helped write the standard, ‘Services Contracts – Guidance for the design content and structure of contracts’, which is about to go for a final vote before publication. ‘That’s been an incredibly eye-opening process and difficult at times, but we’re at the final stages of getting it over the line. It’s been incredibly rewarding.’
Simultaneously, Fahey has risen to vice president of legal affairs at Inmarsat, which in late 2019 completed its £2.6bn sale to a consortium led by buyout giants Apax Partners and Warburg Pincus alongside Canada’s CPP Investment Board and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board. The legal team’s headcount sits at 14, including three in the US, with Fahey’s responsibility predominantly for the company’s aviation business unit. His day job includes negotiating multimillion-dollar, long-term contracts with international airlines to provide broadband connectivity to airplanes, through its Global Xpress network and European Aviation Network. There is also a public private partnership with the European Space Agency looking to replace air traffic control radio communication systems with satellite communication, which aims to improve the safety and efficiency of air traffic control.
He has also taken the legal lead on a number of internal transformation initiatives – a technology infrastructure overhaul project called OneIT, which replaced the company’s systems, servers and networks; the company’s GDPR response; and a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) programme to provide self-serve capability to the business for standard NDAs.
‘It’s a dynamic company and as a result the legal team’s having to stay relevant and become more innovative,’ he comments. ‘One of my other hats is to keep abreast of legal operations, technology improvements and the like. All the projects I’ve been involved with have the intent of making it quicker and easier to do business.’
Data & Marketing Association
Team size: Three
Major legal advisers: Bates Wells, Bird & Bird, Bristows, Davidson Chalmers Stewart, Dentons, Linklaters, Wedlake Bell
GDPR came into force in May 2018, overhauling legislation around personal information and how organisations, companies and individuals must protect it.
Marketing is one industry dramatically impacted by the reforms. The Data & Marketing Association (DMA), the largest not-for-profit industry body for marketing professionals in Europe for more than 1,000 members, including the BBC, Sky, HSBC, Specsavers and Samsung, hired its first GC, Asli Yildiz, not long after the landscape shifted.
Yildiz, a lawyer with experience in data privacy and cyber security at Taylor Wessing and in-house at Canon, was tasked with driving the industry response to data regulation and helping establish a best-practice code of conduct. The DMA’s legal team of three provides free, indemnified legal advice to its members, many of which have no legal team, on their marketing – it handled more than 2,500 enquires related to GDPR in less than a year.
Another big piece of work has been Yildiz’s contribution to an EU-wide marketing code of conduct, which she has helped draft alongside the Federation of European Direct and Interactive Marketing. This involved meeting with the European Commission and the French Data Protection Authority, with the code expected to be completed this year.
Unsurprisingly, Brexit also presented a big challenge in 2019. ‘We received hundreds of questions, mainly focusing on the transfer of data after Brexit,’ Yildiz comments. ‘We worked with various institutions to provide them with members’ views on Brexit and data transfer, including the legal and practical solutions to international data transfers from the UK to EU, post-Brexit.’
To bring all this guidance together, Yildiz established a legal and marketing hub for DMA members to provide a platform for representatives to meet and discuss matters affecting the marketing sector. ‘The hub helped to clarify many ethical and legal issues within the industry, and provide real-time solutions to common disagreements that can occur between legal and marketing departments,’ she adds. ‘This will also help reduce the legal costs of our members, who – particularly if they have limited legal resources and budget – will gain value from experience sharing at the hub.’