The Client Profile: Nigel Paterson, Currys

‘I’m an extrovert and I like to get out there. An in-house role is much more team orientated than private practice,’ notes Nigel Paterson, the general counsel (GC) of British electricals retailer Currys, on his decision to go in-house some 25 years ago.

And it soon becomes apparent that, so illustrious has been his career, somehow none of the gravitas is lost through Paterson drinking from his daughter’s Little Miss Naughty mug throughout the interview with LB.

Having studied Classics at the University of Oxford, Paterson soon decided that a career in academia surrounded by books was not for him. However, being a man of letters helped to steer him towards a legal career. ‘I’ve always loved language and how it is used, and law is fundamentally about crafting things and communicating,’ he explains.

Paterson notes that his father studied law and his godfather, Sir Peter Gibson, is a former barrister and Court of Appeal judge. He quips: ‘I was surrounded by lawyers!’

He adds: ‘Growing up, I admired my godfather for his searing intellect and his ability to distil the most complicated problems into the simplest of words,’ citing him as an inspiration.

After completing his legal qualification, Paterson secured a role as an intern at the European Commission (EC). For six months, he was a trainee in the legal team of Directorate General VI, supervising the agricultural market in the EU. ‘I speak fairly good French and I love being at the centre of political decision making. There were some very talented people in the Commission, and I loved it there,’ he reflects.

However, Paterson’s ambitions of a permanent job at the EC did not come to fruition, and he returned to London to start a training contract at Linklaters, where he qualified into the corporate team.

It was a bit of a step-change from his internship. ‘When I got to Linklaters, I knew I wasn’t going to get two hours for lunch like at the EC. But I thought I’d get an interesting insight because, at the time, I wanted to be a competition lawyer. But I’d soon forgotten that. When you’re in a corporate finance role at a Magic Circle firm, you don’t have time to think about what you’ve left behind or what you could be doing – you’re focused on the present, which takes up everything.’

Spending almost five years at Linklaters, Paterson recalls that his most embarrassing career moment happened when he was a trainee. One night at around 2 o’clock in the morning, 25 directors of major international banks had flown in to sign documents for the refinancing of Eurotunnel. Assigned the simple task of printing off the name of the attendees, in a panic, Paterson inserted the only piece of letter headed paper in the office wrongly into the printer. Desperate to fix the blunder, he rushed across the City to get a new piece of paper. When he returned, however, he faced a slow hand clap started by one impatient banker, annoyed at waiting around for 45 minutes in the wee small hours.

‘Blame culture is unhealthy because it leads to people not being open about things that they need to tell you about.’

Labelling the experience ‘horrendously embarrassing’, Paterson recalls: ‘I had the partner in charge just glaring at me and wondering where the hell I’d been. It was awful. When you’re a trainee, you just fear the worst and think: “That’s my career going up in smoke!”’

However, Paterson concedes that the gaffe informed his own leadership style. ‘Blame culture is unhealthy because it leads to people not being open about things that they need to tell you about. Management style now has to be about engaging with what the company wants, but also engaging with the team about what they want to derive from their work.’

He adds: ‘I don’t want to micromanage people. I don’t even have an office – I’m in the middle of an open plan because it’s important to be available and not hide. I don’t want to have that situation where junior lawyers are terrified of walking into a partner’s room. I want to push people to give their best, while also being supportive and empathetic.’

Leaving Linklaters, Paterson took a job as legal counsel at international oil and gas company ExxonMobil International, but has no regrets about his time in the Magic Circle: ‘I really enjoyed being at Linklaters, I worked with fantastic, talented people and I always wanted to work on big international deals.’

Paterson is candid that his time at ExxonMobil, spanning less than two-and-a-half years, wasn’t really for him. ‘It’s important to be joining an organisation where you’re aligned with the culture and values. I learned a lot from those two years, but it was a misstep in the sense that I don’t think I was ever going to feel at home in that sort of corporate culture and in that industry.’

After ExxonMobil, Paterson says that he was drawn to getting back into M&A work. One of his former colleagues from Linklaters, who moved to BT, told him there was no shortage of M&A deals at the telecoms giant. ‘I was sold on that prospect,’ he says.

On joining BT, Paterson recalls working on one of his most memorable cases. At six years qualified, he played a key role in advising on the demerger of O2. In 2001, BT announced the spin-off of the BT Wireless business, establishing a newly listed holding company, mmO2 plc, which operated under the O2 brand. He reflects: ‘This was my first big break in the law.’

Handling the £8bn demerger of O2, Paterson helped to coordinate 14 trading agreements while working alongside a team from Freshfields. ‘This was the first time I had led a big corporate transaction as a client. It was 12 months of extremely hard work, but it enabled me to get my hands on the whole of the business.’

Going to BT proved to be a pivotal move, with Paterson staying for 15 years in roles including senior counsel, chief counsel and GC. In his most recent position overseeing the legal, governance, and compliance team supporting BT’s consumer business, he played a lead role in the successful launch of the sports channel, BT Sports, in 2013.

As part of this, BT won the Premier League rights through an auction process, leading him through the excitement of finding TV studios, recruiting presenters, and hiring sports rights lawyers – essentially building the business from scratch. A keen football fan (Arsenal), Paterson says: ‘This was almost like the dream role! It was both subject matter interest and the very rare chance to start something from scratch. I very much enjoyed that.’

In 2015, though, Paterson received a call about a position at Dixons Carphone, following the merger of Dixons and Carphone Warehouse in 2014, before its rebranding as Currys in 2021. ‘This was an opportunity to create one team out of two very distinct businesses and two very distinct operational cultures,’ he remarks.

However, bidding farewell to a 15-year career at one company was not without a sense of trepidation. ‘A large part of the Dixons interview was centred on whether I could operate in a completely different organisation culture,’ he says. ‘BT has a strong organisational culture, quite bureaucratic, whereas a retailer is much more entrepreneurial and fast moving.’

Paterson decided his skillset would transfer. ‘I’d been doing consumer work with BT anyway, so I understood the challenges and opportunities when dealing with consumers. I was prepared for that.’

‘I don’t often think about the alternative to being a lawyer. But if I were, it’d be a radical alternative, deriving a different sort of pleasure.’

Now, with nearly nine years under his belt at Currys, Paterson is group GC and company secretary. His day-to-day involves managing 54 staff across six teams: legal, internal audit and risk, business standards, financial services compliance, company secretariat, and fraud and loss prevention. He also has dotted line accountability for legal teams in the Nordics and Greece.

Reflecting on the qualities of a good in-house lawyer, Paterson says: ‘It’s about having a solutions mindset. A good in-house lawyer looks at all of the potential barriers/issues and finds a way through. You also need to have an interest in the business to be able to drive it forward. The final thing is an ability to communicate complex things in simple ways so people can make decisions.’

In his legal career, he credits the now-retired Philip Bramwell, the former chief counsel (M&A) at BT and his former manager. ‘He was a tremendously driven professional, but he had real humanity and the ability not to take himself too seriously. He was an immensely supportive leader – he allowed us the freedom to get on with what we needed to do without suffocating us.’

Beyond the law, Paterson enjoys outdoor pursuits, often starting off his weekends by waking up at eight o’clock in the morning for a game of tennis. He draws inspiration from tennis player Roger Federer: ‘It’s athleticism and art combined,’ he says.

Paterson expresses equal enthusiasm for Joe Simpson’s 1998 book Touching the Void which has since been adapted into a film. He explains that this true story captures the harrowing tale of two climbers tackling the west face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes in 1985, facing terrifying conditions and ultimately becoming a powerful story of survival. ‘It’s not really about climbing. You don’t have to love mountains. It’s about the ability to survive in really dire circumstances.’

Inspired by this story, Paterson adds that if he hadn’t become a lawyer, he might have considered becoming a mountain guide. ‘I would say I don’t often think about the alternative. But if I were, it’d be a radical alternative, deriving a different sort of pleasure,’ mentioning that he has been known to partake in walking expeditions in the Alps, the Pyrenees, and Scandinavia.

Paterson’s other hobbies include watching football, holding a season ticket at the Arsenal stadium, and attending gigs, ‘If I’m not too old!,’ he quips.

On work-life balance, Paterson notes his ability to be fully immersed in work or completely detached. ‘I know how to be fully on or fully off. Having my wife and kids to fall back on is what gets me through as it provides a sense of balance and perspective. There’s a lot of stresses and strains with being a GC, but it’s important to get out, not be obsessed, and realise there’s a life beyond the law.’

He reluctantly admits that his guilty pleasure is singing Kate Bush in the shower. ‘If you knew what a bad singing voice I have, this is something I should keep under wraps!’ LB

elisha.juttla@legalease.co.uk