About

Team size: 50
Major law firms used: Clifford Chance, DLA Piper, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Lawyers On Demand, Radiant Law

A pioneering use of alternative legal providers has contributed to Catherine Johnson, GC of the London Stock Exchange Group, being nominated for this year’s GC Powerlist.

Johnson is the legal chief of a company that has seen explosive growth in recent times: going from having a £2bn market capitalisation to £14bn in just 14 years. As a result of this breakneck expansion, the in-house legal team has grown to number 50 dotted across the UK, US, France, Italy and Sri Lanka.

In order to keep up with the growth of the business, Johnson instructed her lawyers to form ‘partnerships’ with each strand of the company. She says: ‘The teams under my lawyers are cross-functional and cross-jurisdictional. But they all report back into a central legal function.’

She has also created a structure where there are few junior lawyers: the idea is that everyone in the legal team adds value and can readily contribute to management meetings. Johnson has an innovative solution to this focus on high-end work: she outsources entire high-volume aspects of the legal function to flexible providers like Radiant Law and Lawyers On Demand. Johnson’s theory is that high-quality work for the in-house team results in high job satisfaction. ‘The complexity of the issues that we have to think about, means their job satisfaction is very high. The turnover in my team is pretty low. I have been here for over 20 years and I will always say I have never done the same thing twice.’