About

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Major law firms used: F-Lex, Keystone Law, Lawyers On Demand, Osborne Clarke

It is hard to picture a more drastic change of scenery: swapping 15 years of cut-and-thrust at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer for a GC role at Notonthehighstreet, the online marketplace for curated gifts.

That is exactly what Kate Burns did. She had psyched herself up for the in-house switch in 2016 and knew to expect a drastic cultural difference. Even so, she was surprised. Upon arrival, she was immediately assigned a ‘personality colour’, based on research by Insights. Red can be competitive and demanding, blue cautious and reserved, yellow sociable and flamboyant, green caring and docile. ‘I’m a mixture between blue and red apparently, and many of my new colleagues were yellow. I came from a law firm filled mostly by blues and reds!’

Sociable and nurturing colours aside, this has been a demanding role for Burns in an industry under intense pressure. In 2018, she was forced to appear in front of an Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee, after it found UK retailers were ‘complacent’ about the sale of real fur being advertised as fake fur. It presented Burns with a monumental task: ‘I have been working on how, in a marketplace of 5,000 sellers and 250,000 products, we can help our sellers stop real fur from getting into their supply chains.’

But it is not just external regulation. For Notonthehighstreet, with its unique system of marketing and selling fashionable products made by other individuals and small businesses, there are soul-searching questions as to what extent it should self-regulate – questions Burns has to answer.

‘Online marketplaces are a large part of the future of retail, but they are still a fairly new concept. While the sellers are the ones who are solely responsible for the products they sell on our marketplace, we also have to make sure they are selling in a compliant, fair and ethical way. We have to find the right balance and engage with regulators to work out what does and does not require more scrutiny.’

Overall, she sees the benefit of the occasional blue in a sea of yellows. She concludes: ‘Being that blue person who remains calm and provides level-headed advice – these are not necessarily legal skills, but it can be invaluable to the business.’