About

Group head of legal at Mercury Engineering Darren Isaacson, began his career at Arthur Cox, where he trained and focused on construction and corporate practices. After a secondment at ESB in 2011 he moved in-house with them in 2013 as a senior commercial solicitor. In 2016 he moved to Mercury Engineering as their group head of legal, his current role. With regards to the in-house legal industry, Isaacson enjoys the ‘closeness to the business, the “real time” element of the work, the necessity for practicality and the necessity to understand other elements of the business and the different business disciplines within it’. Issacson has relished the opportunity to establish the legal function in Mercury Engineering. He says, ‘while lawyers are in one sense always managing projects and people, the change to a formal management leadership role brought different, non-legal challenges. The function has since grown, and the ambit of our activities is growing as the competence and ability of the function is understood’. Mercury operates within the construction industry and every contract is to carry out and deliver projects, or work packages within an overall project, for clients. A key change since Issacson’s appointment has been implementing a formal, repeatable, process to contract review, negotiation and hand-off to the project teams, to ensure the latter abide by its terms and administrative requirements. Issacson highlights that he ‘sees a huge part of my role as educational, giving people the base knowledge to understand why I am seeking particular changes for the sake of the business as a whole, and to be able to interact better with me. A quid pro quo is that I need to learn more about the various disciplines within Mercury. Everyone understanding the specialist language and acronyms and concepts of each other’s discipline leads to greater effectiveness and communication, and ultimately outcomes’. Isaacson has also improved the company’s supply chain function, the contracts it enters into with suppliers and subcontractors. Much the same process has been put in place for the client facing contracts. The overall benefit has been to put the company on a safer legal footing and to educate the company about risk in general.