South West: Bristol Fashion

According to Shahzia Daya, service manager and deputy monitoring officer (legal services) for Bristol City Council, activity in Bristol at the moment is such that ‘the type of work that we can provide for lawyers is probably some of the best work in local government at the moment – it’s groundbreaking, it’s cutting edge’.

In 2012, the council came under the auspices of an elected mayor, resulting in ‘the review of our constitution and the way we look at delegation and decision-making across the authority’. In addition, Bristol was named European Green Capital for 2015, in recognition of the city’s environmental efforts. Support for such projects keeps the legal team busy, which has not escaped the attention of local law firms keen to build their own experience in emerging areas. ‘We have been offered quite a lot of pro bono advice in areas that are seen as new, like the energy projects. Firms are very keen to get their foot in,’ notes Daya. The legal team has taken a leading role in developing this area and one member of the team picked up Young Local Government Solicitor of the Year in 2013 for handling all of the wind turbine work. ‘We were the first authority to do wind turbines,’ says Daya, ‘so we have highly specialised skills in some areas that are now becoming quite sought after in the private sector.’

The council keeps much of its work in-house. ‘We are down to about 10% of our overall legal spend going outside,’ says Daya. ‘It was 20% about three years ago, so it’s coming down.’ Specific projects are often conducted in tandem with external law firms, but, for example: ‘We’ve got an issue with state aid, but in Bristol we have quite a lot of experience with state aid matters, so we’re trying to do the bulk of that directly with central government ourselves.’

This mode of thinking is fostered by the locality. ‘The university has a big impact for us. A lot of students tend to stay in the city, so the pool of lawyers we can recruit from is probably one of the highest outside of London in calibre.’

Looking forward, the plan is to bring in legal work from other public bodies: ‘Our aspiration is to be the legal hub for public sector bodies in the South West,’ says Daya. This entails Bristol City Council offering a legal centre of excellence to other public bodies. Such shared services are intended to drive efficiency, reduce cost and generate income. When it does outsource, the team is innovative in its methods – often instructing the Bar directly and negotiating bespoke arrangements.

A few years ago the council conducted a joint procurement exercise for panels of solicitors and barristers with three other authorities, and as Daya says: ‘The shift is definitely not to be so regional in terms of panels – it’s a much wider geographical net.’ The council has an eye on the panel review currently being conducted by Cornwall Council for the whole of the South West and also on existing central government framework agreements.

As the UK’s leading multi-channel trade supplier of trade tools, plumbing, electricals, bathrooms and kitchens, Screwfix is recognised as being where the trade buys and it offers customers the flexibility to choose from over 23,000 specialist products. Starting out as a single-site operation back in 1979, the business has expanded exponentially, says director of legal Matthew Smith.

Nowadays it is a national operation with over 360 stores across the UK and ambitions abroad. ‘We have just opened up four trial stores in Germany,’ he says. ‘We have also launched specialist websites in France, Germany and Ireland. As well as continuing to grow our UK business, we are also now looking at opportunities to grow further into Europe.’

Nevertheless, ‘we’ve always been a Yeovil-based business and I don’t believe there are even any vague thoughts to change that,’ says Smith, although he also notes that it can bring issues when recruiting talent for senior roles. ‘It’s very hard for people to get the experience down in Yeovil from other companies because there aren’t that many down here compared to the South East.’ But there are some, Screwfix included, and so Yeovil’s motto – ‘the heart of the country, the mind of a city’ – does resonate, particularly for the retail and aviation sectors.

Being familiar with the locality can be advantageous for external law firms looking to work with Screwfix, which tends to outsource transactional work, although it’s not the most important factor, and the company can and does go outside of the region for some matters. However: ‘From a property perspective, if we were acquiring new stores – and we have acquired 60 stores a year for the past three years – it’s always helpful for local firms to deal with local properties because they will know any particular issues in the region.’

The key factor is commerciality, particularly, stresses Smith, knowing when to drop matters versus knowing when to fight hard for them. But, he continues: ‘To know that, you need to know the business, so it’s also about knowing the company, knowing what drives them, what’s important to them.’

And that is where the local factor can prove handy because it ‘comes back to the point about coming to our offices, just seeing what goes on, sitting in on meetings and understanding the business’. And of course, individual attitudes come into play too – ‘whether lawyers are responsive, proactive and how they deal with matters. I like our lawyers to be hungry rather than complacent. Our legal spend isn’t particularly high, but I think you shouldn’t treat a client any differently whether their legal spend is £1,000 or £1m.’

Chief among the matters on Smith’s desk are the changes to the data protection laws being proposed by Europe. ‘They will have a massive impact on the way all businesses deal with customers’ data, and it is important that we address this early to ensure customers retain complete trust in Screwfix,’ he says. In addition, like all retailers, the company must ensure it complies with standards set by the Advertising Standards Authority, to continue being ‘fair, transparent, honest and decent in the way we promote our products’.

According to Liverpool Victoria (LV=)’s general counsel and company secretary, Rachel Small, the company’s aim ‘is to be Britain’s best-loved insurer’. As a mutual, it is owned by its 1.1 million members and although its head office is now based in Bournemouth, the company was not always based there. When it was formed in 1843, the Liverpool docks were its home, up until 1996 when the organisation arrived on the South Coast following its merger with Frizzell. Nowadays, LV= considers itself a national company, with 17 offices up and down the UK.

Small runs the legal and secretariat functions together, comprising 15 people, ten of whom are lawyers. ‘We’re constantly looking at ways that we can improve ourselves,’ she says. ‘It’s about continuing to offer an excellent service to our internal clients and being an integral part of the business and a trusted business adviser.’ This entails balancing the resource with the demands the business places upon the function, which includes M&A transactions and large-scale projects, alongside general commercial and business-as-usual matters. For large-scale and specialist projects the team might seek external assistance, such as last year when the company went through a debt raising of £350m for the first time in its history.

The team runs a panel arrangement, which it re-tenders every three to five years. But Small emphasises: ‘It’s all about developing relationships with those external firms – we wouldn’t swap them just for the sake of it. The better external teams will understand our business, our strategy and where we’re going, and their legal advice will be much better and more tailored as a result.’

Often the nature of the work outsourced means going to City-based firms, although the team chooses where it is more appropriate and cost-effective to go. On evaluating the performance of those chosen advisers, Small says: ‘If you have good relationships with your panel firms, you shouldn’t get any nasty surprises and we don’t have that with our current firms, as we’ve developed very good relationships with them. Basically, panel firms need to demonstrate value for money and provide a swift, effective and, obviously, legally correct solution.’

The world’s first green electricity company, Ecotricity, addresses three core areas: energy, transport and food. So as well as building and operating wind farms, then selling the power to customers, Ecotricity runs Britain’s most comprehensive fast-charging network for electric cars, owns a football team, has an ethical online store, and a wave power device that creates hydro-electricity. Such pioneering work earned former new age traveller and founder Dale Vince an OBE, and he still owns and runs the company on a not-for-dividend basis.

Working at an energy company, GC Tom Cowling points out, is to find yourself in an intensely political environment. ‘Energy, and especially renewable energy, is mercilessly chucked from pillar to post by the politicians,’ he says. ‘Small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) need regulatory visibility and clarity to justify investment. It’s a tough decision whether or not to invest in, for example, a solar park if prospects of planning permission and subsidy revenue are uncertain.’

Uncertainty trickles down commercially, too: ‘It is quite hard to be a developer when the landscape of our business keeps changing because of the politics, to know what price to strike, whether and where to invest in the given area of land, be it in Scotland or in England. It’s difficult to obtain planning permission,’ he says.

On the regulatory front, there is an ongoing Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) investigation into the energy sector, which is an opportunity for Ecotricity says Cowling. However, one of the concerns the CMA may have is distortions caused to the market’s competitiveness by vertically integrated companies – those that both generate energy on the wholesale side and supply it to customers on the retail side – of which Ecotricity is one, although when compared to the ‘Big Six’ energy companies: ‘We’re very different. We’re much smaller and we’re much greener, having started from scratch 15 years ago with just one wind turbine on a hill outside of Stroud.’ Today’s operation is a far cry from that, having enjoyed much commercial success while remaining an SME.

Cowling and his five in-house colleagues tackle ‘the usual legal issues relating to marketing, HR, finance, IT and IP’, as well as navigating the complexities of energy and construction law and, with their colleagues in the compliance team, the CMA investigation, as well as the ever-present challenge of obtaining planning permission. Outsourcing legal work is often inevitable. ‘Even an experienced in-house team like ours can’t do everything and there are times when the commercial significance of the issue to the business requires specialist advice, such as in some litigation matters where either the sums involved are quite high or the resources required are significant or you need a third opinion.’

Ecotricity has an informal panel and if it is a specific project, as opposed to ongoing general advice, Cowling tends to invite two or three firms to propose or tender. ‘I would do that on identical terms,’ he says. ‘I want to be fair and I don’t ask people to pitch if they haven’t got a chance of getting it.’

‘I like responsiveness,’ he adds. ‘I like to know that my issue, my job is being dealt with. That doesn’t mean it has to be turned around instantaneously, but it does mean that I have to be kept in touch with. I like lawyers who recognise not just what we’re good at but what I’m bad at. It’s about being emotionally intelligent and proactively supportive.’

catherine.rodgers@gcmagazine.com