About

Heading a 52-strong team, Alan Daly is credited for integrating the legal department into the business more comprehensively than ever before. Since his arrival in 2011, Daly has built up the legal team to support all areas of the business, and make the function completely self-sufficient in a number of practise areas whilst ensuring compliance with EU rules. Daly is credited for transforming how the legal team in ESP functions, and says it operates today as ‘a small law firm within a company’. Daly also notes that, although he inherited the legal team, it took some time to gain the trust of the legal function. Thanks to Daly’s open and transparent management approach he has influenced his legal team to communicate in more effective and informal ways than previously used, and adopted an open-door policy to encourage overall team cohesion. On these significant changes, Daly says ‘building a sense of purpose and togetherness and collegiality has been hugely positive’. Amongst his most integral changes, introducing core specialisms into the team and promoting greater knowledge-sharing across the organisation stand out. The overall result, Daly argues, has been to reposition the function from ‘service provider’ to ‘trusted advisor’.