Sabine Chalmers
BT
Team size: 388
Major law firms used: Addleshaw Goddard, Allen & Overy, Axiom, Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, CMS Cameron McKenna Nabarro Olswang, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Halebury, Matheson, Paralaw, Reed Smith
‘All the men are scared of her; she’s impressive.’
In April 2018, BT replaced one of the most influential and admired general counsel in the UK, Dan Fitz, with another leading light in the community, Sabine Chalmers. Chalmers joined from Anheuser-Busch Inbev, where she was legal chief and corporate affairs officer for 13 years. Little wonder then that Chalmers was seen as a safe pair of hands to take on one of the most senior legal roles in the UK.
That experience has been vital in what was a tumultuous year. In May, BT announced plans to cut about 13,000 jobs (likely including some in the legal team) over the next three years in a bid to cut £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, takes over in 2019.
‘It’s been well documented we are on a journey,’ Chalmers says. ‘We have a new chief executive coming in. I’ve been through that many times and can bring my change management skills to help the team and organisation through that.’
Chalmers has replicated the wider business strategic shift by transforming her legal function, announcing a new leadership team of seven in June. There is a GC for each unit, as well as one for corporate, a company secretary and chief operating officer. Each has about five direct reports, which means Chalmer’s extended leadership group is about 40 people. The main change for her is fewer direct reports and more senior positions within the team. She describes her management style as ‘very informal’. The focus is on giving lawyers accountability at all levels and not micro-managing. She believes that will create an environment in which everyone continuously learns and is challenged.
‘If there’s an issue that we’re dealing with and the lawyer that is accountable happens to be two or three steps removed in terms of reporting, I nevertheless want to work with that lawyer directly or ensure that lawyer gets exposure to senior management. The better lawyers are the ones that have had more experiences because it helps them to exercise judgement and solve different types of problems.’
Other legal team initiatives include an emphasis on simplifying ways of working and processes, mirroring a wider BT push. Chalmers sees a big role for legal in doing that, however, particularly in areas like governance, simplifying what needs to be seen and signed off by a lawyer. As the company moves into a fresh strategic cycle alongside a new chief executive, Chalmers says BT will take a look at its external adviser arrangements, where there are many long-standing relationships, particularly with Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer.
‘We’re in an industry in which the judgement calls we make, particularly around technology and investment and commitment, are long-term ten or 20-year plays, whereas we know regulation or politics has a much shorter timeline. We have to help the business navigate those two conflicting forces.’
One partner at a US firm says: ‘All the men are scared of her; she’s impressive. She took over from a man on a deal that people had been trying to do for three months and people said “now that a woman is involved, we know this deal is definitely going to get done”.’
Caroline Kenny
FACEBOOK
Team size: 35
Major law firms used: Baker McKenzie, Lewis Silkin, Osborne Clarke, RPC
‘Kenny is well known in the legal world and a true specialist in the digital market,’ comments Oliver Bray, partner and head of commercial at RPC. As associate GC for Facebook’s media products line, her job is unique for a number of reasons, not least the extremely fast-paced nature of the work, which requires her to move quickly with Facebook’s services as they evolve onto the market.
‘I need to be mindful of how products are received by the world and the reputational risks they pose to the company. We continue to fight fake news and misinformation on Facebook, and we recently announced a $300m investment in news programmes over the next three years to support local news providers to grow their online business models,’ she says. As she points out, 2018 was a tough year for Facebook following a sweep of privacy breach scandals and increased scrutiny on the organisation’s regulatory compliance.
The cross-global reach of Facebook’s services, Kenny adds, throws up continual regulatory challenges for a company that services some two billion users. ‘I do a lot of user-experience stuff to ensure Facebook’s media products are compliant with local market regulations and that users are protected,’ she says.
But Facebook has pioneered a lot of new concepts in the digital space since its birth in 2004, often leaving Kenny to navigate previously unexplored regulatory landscapes from scratch.
She was one of the first few lawyers Facebook hired in London when she joined the company three years ago. Before that, she was a solicitor in RPC’s commercial, intellectual property and technology team, and was previously legal counsel for The Financial Times and Google. Her team of around 20 are based in London but report into the US.
She spends a lot of her working day on video calls with her US colleagues, a method of communication she says is the norm at Facebook. And she thinks Silicon Valley giants like Facebook and Google have the potential to spark cultural changes in legal departments outside the tech world. ‘The move away from bums on seats in a legal office has been hugely apparent in recent years, but the profession as a whole still has so far to go. Lawyers in firms are the only people I still talk to at work on a telephone rather than via a video call,’ she comments.
The best advice Kenny has received is that tech-sector clients do not appreciate long pieces of legal advice. ‘I am always surprised by how many lawyers there still are in the City who can’t simplify their advice. Clients these days use law firms as partners or as an extension to the in-house team, but we need outside counsel to really understand how we work and the language we speak – the days of heavily caveated legal advice are long gone.’
Stephen Godsell
GUARDIAN MEDIA GROUP
Team size: Four
Major law firms used: Ashfords, Baker McKenzie, Bristows, DAC Beachcroft, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Greenberg Traurig, MinterEllison
Three years ago, The Guardian was running a significant operating loss, sapped by the ever-waning influence of print journalism. Even with a substantial £1bn endowment fund, the business was not sustainable. A radical three-year cost-saving plan was drawn up to get the business making profits again. GC Stephen Godsell and the rest of the in-house legal function were not excluded from the endeavour. ‘We are considerably smaller than we used to be,’ Godsell observes. ‘It has meant we’ve had to do things in a much more focused and efficient way.’
One of the innovative ways Godsell reacted to the limitations was with what he calls a ‘triage system’, which determines the importance of a legal matter. Based on a series of questions, a mandate deemed not as important would be redirected to external counsel, leaving the more skilled work to be dealt with in-house.
He comments: ‘It works quite well because it doesn’t need supervision by one of our full-time lawyers.’ Some of the high-level work undertaken by his legal team includes advising on the creation of The Ozone Project, an online advertising business formed collaboratively with The Sun publisher News UK and The Daily Telegraph. It was formulated in response to demand from advertisers for a one-stop shop to buy digital adverts across the UK’s leading news sites. It also aims to redress the balance in the continued siphoning of advertising revenues to the likes of Google and Facebook.
A major aspect of the cost-saving plan, The Guardian agreed an outsourcing deal, led by deputy GC Lucy Mee, with Trinity Mirror to redesign its newspaper format, going from a unique but expensive Berliner format to a tabloid layout. Godsell insists it was a key deal for the business: ‘It may not sound like a dramatic commercial deal, but from a trust perspective, to outsource our printing, which we’ve kept in-house for so long, was a really big step and required extensive negotiations.’
Godsell has drawn praise from his peers in the industry. Angus McBride, GC of News UK, comments: ‘He is very bright. Obviously [The Guardian] is not the first place someone from News UK would point out! But he’s very commercial, more so than me.’
Bjarne Tellmann
PEARSON
Team size: 170
Major law firms used: Charles Russell Speechlys, DLA Piper, DWF, Fieldfisher, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Herbert Smith Freehills, Kemp Little, Pinsent Masons
The GC and chief legal officer of Pearson, Bjarne Tellmann, has managed to cut more than 40% off the in-house legal department’s fixed costs in the last few years. He is confident he can get a further 20% reduction in the next two years.
‘It took a lot of imagination. If you don’t have the pressure to cut, then you’re obviously not going to do it,’ he comments. ‘But the amount of work is increasing and the resources are flat or reducing, so that forces you to rethink things.’
The 170-strong in-house legal and compliance team, including 150 in legal, is down from about 220 when Tellmann first joined Pearson from The Coca-Cola Company in 2014. The team is spread across six continents and all report on straight lines to Tellmann. He added an associate GC for technology and strategy, Robert Mignanelli, to oversee a legal operations team. But the emergence of an internal transaction service centre, developed with external provider Morae Legal, is credited with providing the biggest change. ‘We’re moving up the food chain in terms of the complexity of agreements we are handling and managing in that centre, and leveraging technology to optimise the process.’
Pearson has also reduced the number of firms on its roster and is looking to create an alternative service provider panel. His vision is a four-tier structure: legal operations co-ordinating in-house lawyers, external law firms and alternative service providers. But this requires restructuring his in-house team to create smaller groups of highly skilled lawyers who work on broader business issues and rely on New Law resourcing when required. His lawyers undertake MBA-style training at various external providers, but Tellmann believes a business school needs to develop a specific legal MBA.
‘None of this is to say that we will significantly reduce our headcount further,’ he comments. ‘We’re at a good place; the next step is about breaking borders, and taking on new and different tasks, not being constricted by buckets and hierarchies. We’ll be much more nimble.’
Carolyn Jameson
SKYSCANNER
Team size: 12
Major law firms used: Bird & Bird, CMS Cameron McKenna Nabarro Olswang, Pinsent Masons
‘Offering customer service has become a massive project and taken up quite a lot of time for us.’
The remit of Skyscanner chief legal officer Carolyn Jameson inevitably expanded following the travel metasearch engine’s £1.4bn acquisition by Chinese online travel giant ctrip.com in 2016. But having stepped down from her role after six years at the start of 2019, it will be time for her to hand over the reins as the Scotland-based company embarks on a strategic shift, likely taking payments directly rather than simply referring customers on. Jameson will remain at Skyscanner as an adviser until the end of April.
‘It’s all about how we start offering customer service,’ she says. ‘That has become a massive project and taken up quite a lot of time for us.’ The catalyst has been that acquisition by ctrip, already the second-largest online travel agency in the world, and the subsequent companies it has bought – such as Trip.com in late 2017 – as the Chinese company seeks a bigger international footprint.
Jameson and her team of 12, up from eight about a year ago, work directly with the parent company on any of its M&A work outside of China. Jameson describes the Trip.com acquisition as complex, and involving splitting assets between Skyscanner and ctrip. The strategic shift will see the two companies more directly collaborate, with Skyscanner establishing an Edinburgh call centre for ctrip, which will in turn provide customer service support for Skyscanner.
‘We operate independently and need to maintain that independence: it’s almost like you’re negotiating with your parent company.’ Almost all matters are dealt with internally, due to the specialist knowledge of the business Jameson believes is required. Building the appropriate internal relationships has become more difficult, however, as the company has grown to more than 1,300 employees.
Customer service and taking payments from customers directly, and the regulatory hurdles around that, will dominate Skyscanner’s legal workload for the foreseeable future, however. A European Commission package-travel directive in 2017 stipulated that such a model would require the ability to put people’s money in a separate place, provide refunds and flight cancellation protocol. ‘Skyscanner has not had to deal with any of that complexity; it’s just been a referral model. If you then add customer service to that as well, it’s becomes quite a different beast.’
Matthew Wilson
UBER (EMEA)
Team size: 50
Major law firms used: Covington & Burling, De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek, Herbert Smith Freehills, Hogan Lovells, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, NautaDutilh
‘Matt Wilson at Uber is someone who has to deal with very thorny and constant legal issues,’ comments a fellow technology company’s GC. ‘You would go a long way to find someone who has a more difficult job.’
Wilson’s job, having risen from the ridesharing company’s first UK lawyer back in 2015 to associate GC for EMEA today, has involved a raft of high-profile legal and regulatory setbacks. He nearly resigned twice in his first six months.
But the well-regarded GC is credited with both helping Uber navigate those thorny legal issues, and with building a strong and cohesive team that has more than tripled its headcount in three years. There are 50 people working across 43 countries in the region, with lawyers from 18 nationalities, qualified in 15 jurisdictions, while half the team is female, including leadership.
Key Uber projects have included launching UberPool; obtaining regulatory change in countries across EMEA; launching Uber Eats; and working to achieve renewal of its private-hire operator licence in London after TfL initially refused to renew it in September 2017. More litigation looms after Uber’s case in a separate battle over the employment classification of its drivers was rejected by the Court of Appeal in December 2018.
But the team has managed to bring more work in-house, cutting the proportion of external legal spend from about 75% of budget to 58%. Wilson stresses the importance of recruiting the right people, whether that be with supplementary skills like coding, or someone with experience in a particular jurisdiction.
‘Our team has an important role in making sure we have the right internal culture. It matters a lot to me that we don’t just get English-qualified lawyers with the same background and experience, and plonk them into different parts of the region. We have a real melting pot and that’s not important for appearances, but it’s important for the debate we have as a team and, after that, for making the right decisions.’
Wilson stresses the importance of trust, and being honest with his team and the wider business. He is wary of ‘groupthink’ and wants his team to feel like they can bring their own opinion to the table without simply deferring to what senior people think. ‘We’ve reorganised the team and focus on getting people T-shaped experience. They might come to us as a specialist in employment law, but we make sure they’re getting a much broader experience, both from a legal and business point of view.’
Mine Hifzi
VIRGIN MEDIA
Team size: 45
Major law firms used: Allen & Overy, Ashurst, Bird & Bird, Burges Salmon, Dentons, Harbottle & Lewis, Herbert Smith Freehills, Macfarlanes, RPC, Womble Bond Dickinson
‘I believe in letting others be leaders in their own right by taking the decisions themselves.’
Virgin Media GC Mine Hifzi has a simple agenda for her 45-strong legal team across the UK and Ireland: provide deep expertise and commercial thinking, while avoiding the ‘boring bunch’ legal stereotype.
And since she took the role in 2013 after the company overhauled its executive following a £15bn acquisition by Liberty Global, Hifzi believes the type of person an in-house lawyer is has become critical. ‘What I increasingly experience is that our commercial colleagues want someone who is easy to do business with, someone who is flexible in their thinking and someone who can be pragmatic about risk.’
Hifzi was previously senior vice president of commercial and legal affairs for Scripps Networks Interactive, and spent 14 years heading up the international legal and government affairs team at Discovery Communications. She is credited with overhauling Virgin Media’s legal team, which has grown from 30 people since the Liberty acquisition.
The company has 5.9 million cable customers and 3.1 million mobile service subscribers, with revenue of nearly £5bn in 2017. Hifzi says the vast majority of legal work – including commercial agreements – is done in-house, with retainers used for repetitive work (there is an employment retainer with RPC, for example) to ensure the team can be nimble to changing business needs.
One of Hifzi’s first objectives when she joined was to embed the lawyers more fully into the business. This is achieved by basing the team across London and Hook, in Hampshire (which will soon move to Reading) to match where different business divisions are located. Being part of Liberty also creates opportunities, with lawyers moving to and from the central functions to gain experience. ‘We need to grow our lawyers and therefore need to create the bandwidth for them to focus on matters critical to the growth of the company. We encourage our lawyers to work with the business to design procedures to ensure we spend the most time on the opportunities that drive the most value. For example, we work on litigation matters together with our claims team where we leverage the necessary expertise.’
Hifzi has also instigated what she calls the Legal Power Hour – fortnightly training sessions with external providers on both technical legal skills and softer skills like communication and wellbeing. This doubles as a time for the in-house team to share experiences from particular deals or work.
‘My style is very much dictated by my core values: fairness, authenticity, inclusivity and family. I am a great believer in listening to the opinions of others and letting others be leaders in their own right by taking the decisions themselves. We have some of the best subject-matter experts in our industry and I thrive on being surrounded by smart people; we spark off each other.’
James Conyers and Vicky Sandry
SKY
Team size: 90 in the UK
Major law firms used: Herbert Smith Freehills
‘I am collaborative and I try to work as an effective team member.’
It will be the end of an era when James Conyers steps down as Sky’s GC this year, after a 26-year career at the broadcasting giant. UK and Ireland GC, Vicky Sandry, will take over his role. In the meantime, she has been appointed deputy group GC.
Conyers first joined Sky in 1993, before rising through the ranks to eventually become group GC in 2015. Despite such a long tenure, arguably the apex of Conyers’ time as GC came in more recent years. In 2018, Comcast acquired 75% of Sky’s shares for £30bn, a landmark transatlantic buyout for the telecoms sector. It was a complex acquisition, with Comcast having to fight off a rival bid from The Walt Disney Company, all under the watchful eye of the Competition and Markets Authority.
Sky will be losing a veteran of the in-house scene when Conyers ultimately departs. On the secret to his success, he says: ‘I am collaborative and I try to work as an effective team member that presents the skills and range of perspectives required of a good GC.’
But the company will be in good hands when the highly regarded Sandry, who has been with Sky since 2005, takes the reins. In addition to effectively running the UK and Ireland legal team since 2016, Sandry has overseen a powerful diversity incentive: over 50% of Sky’s legal leadership roles are filled by women.
Rosemary Martin
VODAFONE
Team size: 500
Major law firms used: Hogan Lovells, Linklaters, Norton Rose Fulbright, Osborne Clarke, Slaughter and May, Squire Patton Boggs, Wiggin
A long-standing ambassador for the in-house legal profession, Rosemary Martin, GC of Vodafone, is as well-versed on innovation and new ideas as anyone. As an example, Martin sits on the Disclosure Working Group, a body made up of GCs, the judiciary and private practice lawyers committed to tackling the burdensome disclosure exercise currently present in high-value litigation.
While a significant proportion of any overhaul of the disclosure process will rest on changing behaviours, Martin is typically enthusiastic about the role technology can play: ‘The idea you can predict the outcome of a dispute is fabulous. I’m looking forward to that technology being more widely available. It should change people’s behaviour and make it less likely that cases end up in court. We have to do something to help make the process of disclosure in litigation less time consuming than it is.’
A major preoccupation during 2018 was figuring out how to make Vodafone an even more attractive place for junior lawyers to work. An overhaul of the company’s flexible working policy to make Vodafone ‘more like a tech company’ has been part of it, but Martin has also considered how the in-house environment compares with private practice in terms of appeal. ‘I don’t think one model is necessarily better than the other. It’s more about the culture of the place you are working at. I recently met two lawyers who just joined us in South Africa and they said they were struggling to understand how they added value to the business. In a law firm, all you have to do is put in a client name and the amount of hours. The metric is very simple. In-house, you don’t have that metric.’
She uses a simple mantra to explain her successful career and it revolves around being a facilitator rather than a blocker: ‘Just say yes. Just say yes, then work out how to do it later.’
Andrea Harris
WPP
Team size: 130 (22 core team)
Major law firms used: Allen & Overy, Bristows, Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, Simkins, Slaughter and May
The world’s largest marketing and public relations company went through a period of considerable change in 2018. British multinational WPP, which pulled in more than £15bn in revenue last year, saw its high-profile founder and chief executive, Sir Martin Sorrell, retire after 33 years amid controversy.
Company veteran Mark Read was appointed chief executive in September 2018 and in the last quarter of 2018 launched a new strategy. Group chief counsel Andrea Harris, herself a longstanding employee of more than 20 years, says her direct legal team of 22, which sits alongside the group’s 130 lawyers, has been supporting WPP through this structural change.
‘We need to return the business to long-term, sustainable growth,’ she comments. ‘It’s looking at creating integrated networks, merging a number of our brands on a global basis, reducing our debt levels and disposing of our non-core investments. The team’s been at the heart of that.’
In October, for instance, the company announced it would dispose of a majority interest in global research data and insight business Kantar, which is expected to raise billions. WPP also unveiled its three-year plan in December, with the restructure expected to cost £300m over that period, while delivering headline operating profit margins of at least 15%. The company also established its first executive committee to implement the new plan and improve WPP’s culture.
Harris has also taken on a second role as head of the group’s sustainability function in the past couple of years, with the aim of integrating sustainability as part of mainstream governance and culture across the business. ‘You don’t see that dual role very often. It was a conscious decision because we wanted to make sure sustainability was at the heart of governance.’
Edward Smith
Telefónica UK
Team size: 31
Major law firms used: DWF, Herbert Smith Freehills, Shoosmiths, Simmons & Simmons
For GC Edward Smith and the Telefónica legal function, the past year can be split into three broad trends encompassing risk, regulation and compliance. As a result, Smith has had to make major adaptations to the internal legal function.
He notes the exponential rise of legislation ‘with the intention to force Telefónica to publish figures on a number of topics,’ including the gender pay gap and modern slavery reporting. ‘It’s a massive increase of detail required for non-financial reporting, and the result of all this is the legal team has to work very closely with our press team and the audit team to make sure the figures are correct.’ He describes this new rise in work as ‘the court of public opinion’.
More specific to Telefónica but also the wider telecoms sector has been increased regulator activity. Ofcom is the relevant watchdog and he says it has taken a greater interest in ‘consumer issues’ – how the mobile giants actually service their customers. ‘Our regulator has taken a keen interest in ensuring consumers have flexibility and that they are properly informed about the provisions of their contracts.’ Smith says this has required a great deal of effort and input from the legal team.
The third trend, compliance, has seen a significant shift in Smith’s team. He says: ‘Of all the areas I am responsible for, compliance is the one that has grown the most. It’s gone from being an important but backroom activity to being front and centre of how we do business.’
On his own leadership style, he concludes: ‘I hope people would think of me as approachable, informal and someone who doesn’t bullshit. I like to think of myself as supportive and, once he has chosen the right person for the job, someone who interferes as little as possible.’
Angus McBride
NEWS UK
Team size: 24
Major law firms used: Allen & Overy, Hogan Lovells, Kingsley Napley, Lewis Silkin, Taylor Wessing, Wiggin
‘If you get the opportunity, it’s an amazing job. I do not regret leaving private practice.’
As GC of The Sun publisher News UK, Angus McBride has spent the last year contending with an ever-harsher environment for print journalism. The year saw a landmark decision in the case between the BBC and Sir Cliff Richard, with Mr Justice Mann’s ruling marking what many journalists would consider a significant defeat for press freedom.
McBride, who became News UK’s GC in 2016, comments: ‘The Cliff Richard case has had wide implications. The public interest in publishing has been lowered immensely by that decision.’
Aside from the squeeze of increasing legal restrictions, the revenues of print journalism have been in steady decline for a number of years. Notably, in 2016, Daily Mail and General Trust issued a warning to investors after recording a 29% drop in profits. The decline was attributed to a fall in print advertising. Despite The Sun being the UK’s second-most-read newspaper, with over 1.4 million readers, McBride is under no illusions: ‘It’s harder and harder to be a newspaper. The main trend is the decline in revenues from print, both within sales and advertising, and the move to use the monetisation on the digital side of advertising.’
McBride’s role as GC means he has to delegate a large amount of the day-to-day legal issues, such as complying with the journalism regulator IPSO, to his team. McBride, who involves himself in the larger set-piece litigation against The Sun, The Times and The Sunday Times as and when they arise, says: ‘It means a lot of people have a lot of responsibility.’
Niri Shan, intellectual property and media partner at Taylor Wessing, appreciates McBride’s heightened sense of responsibility: ‘McBride is very good. He really has the ear to senior management and people respect him.’
Overall, McBride relishes his role: ‘If you get the opportunity, it’s an amazing job. It’s constantly challenging and constantly interesting. I do not regret leaving private practice.’
Spencer Davis
DAILY MAIL AND GENERAL TRUST
Team size: 23
Major law firms used: Bird & Bird, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Reed Smith, Slaughter and May
For Spencer Davis, GC of Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT), last year saw the introduction of a global legal advice panel and the breaking of a 97-year-old duck as a result.
Davis decided the company could make considerable cost savings by overhauling its attitude to external advisers – DMGT had never operated a formal panel. He dedicated 2018 to correcting this, slimming down a flabby roster of 40-50 preferred firms to a list of just eight. The consolidation brought cost savings of around £750,000 – quite significant for a short time period.
But it also brought other advantages. Davis comments: ‘We’re now much more efficient and have more shared values with our external lawyers, who we consider to be an extension of the in-house team.’ Among those making the cut on the new panel was Slaughter and May, which advises on big-ticket M&A, and Bird & Bird, which provides its intellectual property expertise.
Key to the panel procurement process was a necessity for tech and innovation, something that the eight firms have duly obliged in providing. Davis says he takes full advantage of artificial intelligence document management tools and cites Squire Patton Boggs’ employment hub software, which offers quick legal solutions across all jurisdictions.
Despite what people may expect, DMGT’s business is only part editorial and comprises events, information and even real estate divisions. As a result, Davis insists that no two days are the same: ‘I could be advising on cross-border M&A, employment law or a new policy. There is no average day!’
In terms of job satisfaction, Davis concludes it is a case of bringing the best out of his team: ‘The greatest reward for me is helping the guys on my team achieve their career goals.’
Dan Guildford
THE FINANCIAL TIMES
Team size: 19
Major law firms used: Bristows, Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, DLA Piper, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, Pinsent Masons
‘GDPR provided some outstanding opportunities to get the whole team involved in the business.’
Dan Guildford, GC of The Financial Times (FT), featured in last year’s GC Powerlist after the high-profile Presidents Club scandal. An undercover FT reporter exposed the seedy side of the black-tie, men-only fundraising event, bringing a slew of legal considerations with it. The legal ramifications of non-disclosure agreements were brought to the public’s attention.
A year on, Guildford and his team are just as busy. Concluding what was previously a rite of passage for FT lawyers, an archaic trade mark dispute in India, was a major win for the legal chief. Guildford says: ‘After more than 20 years, we reached an agreement to end our trade mark dispute in India, meaning that both parties can now move forward.’
Since being acquired in 2015 by Japan’s largest media company, Nikkei, the FT has been in expansive form. M&A deals for Longitude Research, a provider of thought-leadership research and scoutAsia, a subscription-based data and news service for Asian companies, topped the list. But, like many others, last year was more characterised by regulation than buyouts, with GDPR looming heavily over the FT business. Guildford insists it is key for it not to become an issue siloed solely towards lawyers: ‘GDPR has been huge. The way we approached that was to make sure the whole team was involved, not just one or two people. It provided some outstanding opportunities to get the whole team involved in the business.’
But arguably Guildford’s most notable achievements at the FT are his social mobility efforts. Alongside senior legal counsel and 2018’s Legal Business Rising Star of the Year Kendra James, Guildford has implemented a summer placement programme for university-level students from diverse backgrounds.
As of summer 2019, the FT will be teaming up with partner law firm Pinsent Masons, with students spending half a day at the FT’s offices. The whole FT legal team will give workshops on being an in-house lawyer at a news-reporting organisation. For Guildford, it is a ‘win-win-win’: ‘The students get the experience of seeing life in private practice and in-house, our team enjoy the opportunity to share their experience and we get to develop our relationship with Pinsent Masons.’
Sarah Jones
BBC
Team size: 55
Major law firms used: CMS Cameron McKenna Nabarro Olswang, Fieldfisher
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the BBC was heavily in the public eye throughout 2018. But unusually for GC Sarah Jones, it was a host of legal issues that were causing a stir.
The most high-profile example was the Cliff Richard case – a landmark court battle that had significant implications for privacy laws. The veteran singer won £210,000 in damages after alleging that the BBC invaded his privacy in reporting that he was investigated for historical child sex abuse allegations, despite no charges being made. The BBC argued the decision represented a negative shift in reporting freedoms and, as a result, the willingness for new potential victims to come forward. ‘It’s certainly an interesting time in the development of privacy law’, Jones reflects. ‘Clearly the court felt we were on the wrong side of the line.’
Other legal matters that attracted column inches included scrutiny over the BBC’s gender pay gap, with Mishcon de Reya representing Scottish journalist Carrie Gracie in an equal pay claim. The case against the broadcaster was settled in June. Aside from the negative PR, Jones presided over some big wins in 2018, including playing a key role as the BBC secured a blanket licence with PRS for Music for BBC Music. The agreement allows the BBC to continue using music across all its channels, while making sure that the performing artists receive the appropriate royalties. Jones was also integral as Arif Ansari, head of news at BBC Asian Network, was cleared of naming a sexual abuse victim live on air in January 2019.
In terms of career advice, Jones says it is vital to broaden the traditional lawyer skillset: ‘A lot of people get promoted into these roles because they are very good lawyers, but you can only do it well if you are a very good manager. Management skills aren’t necessarily something you are born with, but you can certainly learn.’
Tom Cassels, dispute resolution partner at Linklaters, comments: ‘Sarah is fantastic. She does a really demanding job; there are few people who have to get into the detail of providing difficult legal advice directly to the business as opposed to [just] leading a team and communicating legal advice.’
Alice Hou
CITYMAPPER
Team size: Two
Major law firms used: Taylor Wessing
In early 2016, transport app Citymapper rose $40m of Series B financing from Index Ventures and Benchmark Capital, the latter a US venture capital firm which was one of the early backers of Uber. That money, alongside a $10m funding round in 2014, reportedly valued the company at more than £250m. Shortly after, Alice Hou joined as the tech start-up’s first GC. Hou, who trained at New York firm Hughes Hubbard & Reed, joined from publicly listed US marketing giant Sapient, where she was head of legal.
Citymapper was founded in 2011 by chief executive Azmat Yusuf, a former Google employee, and has grown from its London launch to provide urban navigation information in 39 cities, including Sydney, Hong Kong, San Francisco, Moscow and Paris. The company’s algorithm uses vast amounts of data to provide users with a multitude of transport options, including bus, train, metro and taxi, as well as presenting journey times and prices.
Hou, who has one other lawyer in her team, has helped launch a pop-up bus; a TfL-approved night bus route in Shoreditch; a shared taxi service in partnership with black-cab app Gett; and its own shared-ride service called Ride.
‘When you’re in-house, whether you’re a GC or just starting out, it’s like being a GP. You’re the first port of call – you have to find what’s potentially serious and then reassure everyone on the stuff that’s not serious,’ Hou comments. ‘And just like a good GP, a good in-house lawyer is able to distinguish one from the other and come up with solutions.’
She says the start-up has a constrained budget, meaning she often tries to build expertise in-house rather than relying on external firms. She cites GDPR as a recent piece of legislation she had to learn and implement in-house. She also wants to instil some of the lessons she learned in her decade at Sapient, which had 14,000 employees, into Citymapper as the company scales up. The notion of GCs providing strategic help is never truer than when a company is evolving, she says. ‘Our commercial model has evolved over time and we have a lot of discussion internally about how we should “improve this” or “solve this” or “make this bigger”. About 40% are those kinds of conversations; they’re not: “Do we need a new permit if we do this?”’
Taylor Wessing partner Adrian Rainey comments: ‘Like many of the leading tech GCs, she has to step into a whole variety of different issues, many of which can be challenging. She consistently demonstrates pragmatism when dealing with those issues.’