About

Emmet O’Grady, general counsel and head of compliance at Storyful returns to the Powerlist and continues to demonstrate managerial and in-house legal excellence. He has extensive experience having trained with Arthur Cox and qualified onto the technology team, where he spent a further five years post-qualification. During this time he honed his skills in providing legal advice to blue chip clients. At this point, he was invited by Paddy Power (a client) to join their legal team, initially on secondment and then as head of legal for paddypower.com. He highlights that, ‘it was during [his] time at Paddy Power that [he] really became a trusted and valuable part of the business, with a role that was much broader than just legal advice. The mantra at this stage became to provide commercially focused, reliable and timely legal and commercial advice to help the business achieve its objectives’. O’Grady joined Storyful in 2015, and was quickly promoted to both general counsel and a member of the leadership team. About leading an in-house legal team, O’Grady highlights that, ‘there can be challenges to leading a high-performing team and keeping them happy where the main opportunity for career progression might appear to be to take your job!’ He says that it is a challenge that he enjoys. The last few years have seen a number of factors that have directly led to an increase in workload for the legal team, not least a growing sales team, a huge growth in revenue, and the advent of GDPR. Notwithstanding this exponential growth in volume of work, the legal team has remained constant, with two lawyers providing coverage globally across all our offices. This increase in volume has been met predominantly through innovation and creating efficiencies. Among the innovations introduced was an agile methodology project management system applied to GDPR operationalisation. O’Grady highlights that, ‘from a practical perspective, this involved breaking down our requirements into manageable bite-sized tasks that we completed fortnightly, with stand-up reviews at the end of every fortnight to track progress’.