About

Team size: 289

Major legal advisers: UK Panel firms are Addleshaw Goddard, Allen & Overy, BCLP, Bird & Bird, Covington & Burling, CMS, DAC Beachcroft, DWF, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Lewis Silkin, Osborne Clarke, Shepherd & Wedderburn, Simmons & Simmons, TLT, Winckworth Sherwood

What are the most important transactions and litigations that you have been involved in during the last year?

The legal and company secretarial team has been very busy over the last year and has partnered with the business on a wide range of matters, a selection of which are outlined below. The internal team has led on these matters, taking advice from our external legal advisers as required.

Covid-19 and the resulting implications for business customers, consumers and the public sector meant increased work for the Legal and Co-Sec function. Some of our most important work included advising on the provision of connectivity and telephony services for NHS Nightingale, and the provision of BT’s Life-Line service to Kings College London, providing guidance on insolvency, force majeure and extended payment terms, supportingproduct and proposition launches to help businesses, including remote working tools, free Office 365 upgrades and licences, IP voice portfolio upgrades and 30-day mobile contracts.

In the sports sector, we: worked with the Premier League on “Project Restart” to bring back live football; supported BT Sport through Covid disruption via settlements and rebates with major sports rightsholders and distributors; renewed our media rights agreements with Moto GP, Premiership Rugby and National League; and igned new deals for the West Indies and New Zealand Cricket rights.

We sold businesses in multiple countries including a number of Latin American ones, France and Spain, and signed a sale agreement in Italy. We also started a number of programmes and initiatives which the employment team supported on, ensuring that we’re doing all we can and thinking creatively as an organisation within the legal parameters and being fair to our colleagues. This has led to the development of an Ethnicity Rapid Action Plan which focuses on training, understanding, data and careers.

The team also advised on the trial of BT’s new Remote Diagnostics service by the UK’s largest NHS Trust, enabling remote consultation and triage between patients and health professionals in the field. The service includes providing medical devices, mobile connectivity, computing equipment and communications equipment to our customer, together with a managed service wrap, to help them transform the way they deliver care to patients.

Did the Brexit deal reached at the end of 2020 give you and your business greater clarity for the future?

The Brexit deal created an overall positive outcome for BT, particularly for our movement of goods, our people, and data flows. The Brexit deal has many forward-looking obligations and “agreements to agree” and our team across the legal function are monitoring developments of those obligations and their impact on BT in 2021 and beyond.

Protecting the business has often meant companies having to make tough decisions. How were you able to assist the company get through the difficult period of the first lockdown?

For our call centre colleagues, we helped enable systems to allow home working for a large proportion of roles; most corporate roles were facilitated to work from home. Retail staff were redeployed onto online work and reskilling programmes during periods of store closures.

These necessary steps were taken to create Covid-19 safe workplaces for colleagues who need to attend the office, either as a requirement of their role and for their own welfare and wellbeing. We supported the roll-out of testing programmes offered by the government to key workers.

All of these measures have meant that no BT Group employees have been placed on furlough, and it has minimised the number of shielding staff unable to be redeployed. Those unable to be redeployed have remained on full pay. The Employment team has made a real difference to our colleagues and the business in helping enable this.

We also reviewed our contracts with our customers and our suppliers to check for any risks and helped our business put in place risk mitigation plans where necessary.

How did your team’s approach – to both working habits and the legal tasks at hand – differ or adapt from the first lockdown to the second and third? What have been the main lessons learned?

Our team adapted well to the first lockdown – with teams being based at multiple locations and some homeworkers we are used to a more virtual team environment. We’ve managed to keep engagement high with no impact on productivity despite the challenges, but we have been very lucky to have had a lot of wellbeing resources, opportunities and social events initiated by BT and the legal and company secretarial function which we’ve fully capitalised on.

Burn out is a real issue through the second and third lockdowns – our teams are working longer and harder and are juggling families, caring responsibilities and the natural challenge of a loss of freedom and ability to do all the things that you’d normally do to relax like go away on holiday. We’ve dialled up our steps to protect our teams’ wellbeing – offering flexibility, regular check-ins and we’ve got creative with virtual social events – with children and pets welcome.

The main lesson we’ve learned is that there is a big difference between flexible working and working from home all the time. Whilst productivity hasn’t dipped, we recognise that prolonged working from home does impact on the ability to get things done – particularly in a big organisation like BT where collaboration is so important across multi-disciplinary teams.

We’ve had new joiners to our function during all three lockdowns; these folk have never been in a BT office and haven’t met their colleagues face to face. We’ve had to change our on-boarding approach to make sure the new joiners feel welcome, included and are getting all the help and support they need to be a success at the company. We’ve put in place buddy systems and encouraged the new joiners to form their own network with each other as well as making sure they are included in all the established networks. We use Workplace as an informal channel of communication where we can post photos, videos and general chat which is more personal.