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Continue reading “The New GC Toolkit: New game, new rules, new players”
The New GC Toolkit: New game, new rules, new players
Client profile: Martin Cook, Funding Circle
The London office of peer-to-peer lender Funding Circle is exactly what you would expect from one of the UK’s largest and most high-profile fintech businesses.
Open-plan, has meeting rooms with names like ‘Borough Market’, and staff play table tennis as you walk into reception. It feels like a fun place to work. Continue reading “Client profile: Martin Cook, Funding Circle”
Big deals – meet the GCs running the headline deals
The global M&A market is booming. Bill Mordan, general counsel at FTSE 100 drug-maker Shire, would know. Shire’s board recently recommended a £46bn takeover offer from rival Japanese pharma giant Takeda.
‘Money continues to be cheap to borrow and so it’s still easy to get funding from venture capital, as well as other speciality equity investments in new technologies,’ Mordan comments. ‘There’s a large quantum of assets out there available for acquisition.’ Continue reading “Big deals – meet the GCs running the headline deals”
Going places: focus on Michelin
Leading a global legal team is a complex role and many general counsel (GCs) could be forgiven for spending all their energy just trying to get the job done. Not so at Michelin. Despite overseeing a legal community of 200 members, comprising lawyers, patent engineers, paralegals and admin staff, spread across 20 countries, group GC Benoit Balmary wanted the team to develop a defined strategy of its own alongside supporting Michelin’s goals.
‘We have the global management team, the management team of the legal function worldwide, which I chair. This is composed of all of the general counsel of the regional teams, and the heads of the biggest domain teams (IP and corporate), and the head of ethics. This team meets every semester and together we set the strategy of the legal department for the coming years,’ notes Balmary. The mission of the legal department, as defined by our management team, is ‘to protect the group against legal risks and to facilitate its business objectives in an efficient, innovative and sustainable way’. Continue reading “Going places: focus on Michelin”
Disruptive tech: Riding Schumpeter’s gale
Storyteller. Ninja. Scrum Master. Brand Champion. Evangelist. The modern commercial world has created many new genres of work, but sometimes it is hard to know what they mean. As the London School of Economics’ headline-grabbing anthropologist David Graeber once wrote: ‘It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working.’
But, argues Nathan Furr, professor of strategy and innovation at INSEAD in Paris, the phenomenon of ‘bullshit jobs’, as they are increasingly derided in popular culture, is not a simple tale of corporate indulgence, but one of confusion and insecurity afflicting some of the world’s most established businesses. ‘A lot of chief executives are wrestling with a very basic question: what do we do? It just isn’t that obvious what many established businesses’ core activities are anymore. The knock-on effect of this uncertainty is a large amount of internal reorganisation and new roles to “deliver end-to-end customer journeys” and “communicate across silos”. The senior executives I work with are wrestling with the question of how they can respond to the challenge of disruption and continue working profitably.’ Continue reading “Disruptive tech: Riding Schumpeter’s gale”
Pearson eyes cost reductions with rejigged legal panel
Education company Pearson has consolidated its legal adviser panels into new ‘preferred’ and ‘general’ rosters, moving away from specialised panels to help reduce costs.
Fourteen firms have been appointed to a new ‘preferred’ panel, which will cover what Pearson describes as ‘day to day requirements’, as well as new areas not formerly covered by external counsel such as US immigration and US employment work. A ‘general’ panel has also been introduced, consisting of 13 firms Pearson has a long-standing relationship with. Continue reading “Pearson eyes cost reductions with rejigged legal panel”