About

Team size: 47
Major law firms used: Addleshaw Goddard, DLA Piper, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer

The last five years have seen Dixons Carphone unify its operations following the £3.8bn merger between Dixons and Carphone Warehouse in 2014. The year after, Nigel Paterson, a former senior lawyer at BT for over 14 years, joined the electronics retail giant as GC and company secretary.
Paterson has responsibility for 47 lawyers across employment, corporate and commercial legal teams in London, Athens and Oslo. Reporting a tough trading environment on the UK high street as consumers increasingly look online for purchases, at present he is helping the company decide on a new five-year strategy to bolster its core retail services.

According to Paterson, electronic sales across the company’s UK-based Currys PC World stores are ‘holding up fairly well but‘ people are keeping their mobile phones for longer, which over Christmas caused a dip in phone sales in its Carphone Warehouse stores. With online sales accounting for around 30% of Dixons’ business, the company wants to grow its online offering and develop more credit options for consumers.

And with the arrival of former Shop Direct boss Alex Baldock as Dixons’ new chief executive in April 2018, Paterson’s post-merger tidy up has been largely a matter of joining together two legal teams at Dixons and Carphone Warehouse before the merger. ‘Most of my four years in the role has been spent building one business and aligning the cultures of the two legal teams – that sort of thing takes time.’

Moving operations to one IT infrastructure platform has also meant negotiating and instigating new supplier contracts for the legal team: ‘We tend to do as much work as we can in-house and use paralegals where we can for routine work, so the lawyers can be focused on what they can best add value to.’

Last year, Dixons reported that around 10 million records containing customer data may have been hacked the year before. Paterson was involved in the immediate aftermath of the breach, including the retailer’s response to the ongoing investigation launched by data information body, the Information Commissioner’s Office. He says GCs are seeing an increasing workload on the compliance side of businesses as fines and sanctions for non-compliance have grown harsher: ‘GCs are also getting much more deeply involved in risk management. I have somebody who works on risk management reporting into me now, but before that I did a lot of risk management with my role.’