About

Team size: Six

Major legal advisers: TLT, Dentons, Kilburn & Strode, Lux Nova

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

There has been a major new collaboration with Gridserve to launch a £30m upgrade of the Electric Highway (Ecotricity’s national EV charging network) with ultra-rapid chargers. Gridserve have taken a 25% stake in the Electric Highway. It was funded by Hitachi Capital UK and over 60 lawyers worked on this deal. This injection of funding was much needed to update an ageing network. We were one of the first to the EV charging market, and our ageing assets really need to be replaced to ensure the future of the Electric Highway and to make sure it is at the forefront of this market. This investment secured that.

We also launched Sky Diamond. We announced in October 2020 that Dale (Dale Vince, Ecotricity’s founder) has plans to create thousands of carats of carbon negative, lab-grown diamonds out of our ‘sky mining facility’ in Stroud. This is the world’s first zero impact diamond. The launch is the culmination of ten years of development, with a very strong focus on brand protection before launch.

Ecotricity owns a league football team, Forest Green Rovers. The past year has been busy with profile raising. We have secured sponsorship packages with major name sponsors – Brewdog, Innocent, Quorn, DreamSport, Sports Direct, among others. We have also engaged Rob Del Naja (of Massive Attack) as the Club’s artistic director and have welcomed Hector Bellerin (Arsenal) as the Club’s second largest shareholder.

We’ve had a busy year delivering against Ecotricity’s credentials as a leading green energy supplier. We sorted out a 15-year Renewables Obligation Certificate offtake agreement with Renewable Exchange and Armstrong Energy. This was a strategically important agreement to secure Ecotricity’s ROC obligations over the next 15 years. We negotiated a pioneering partnership agreement with Geothermal Engineering Ltd that enables the production and sale of geothermal electricity for the first time in the UK, generating steam more than three miles beneath Cornwall to power homes with renewable energy. We also worked hard on another innovative partnership with Gower Power – a community based 1MW solar farm in Swansea.

That, coupled with locking in significant MW of renewable generation power purchase agreements, and securing a decent number of large MW solar development options in the last year puts Ecotricity in a strong position in the green energy supply market. It’s not a done deal yet, but we’ll be building two huge solar pv parks this year, and rather excitingly, we’ve just secured planning permission for our new football stadium (made entirely of wood) at J13 of the M5. A significant amount of legal work went into both.

The next big thing for us is to acquire land in order to rewild various parts of the UK. This is a niche area of law that I’m fascinated by and excited to be involved in.

What were the main steps you took to protect the business once it became clear we were in the midst of an unprecedented challenge?

We immediately implemented a debt enforcement strategy, taking into account the credit risk in our commercial customer base as a result of the pandemic. That recovery strategy has been incredibly successful. Force majeure became the new focus of all contracts – existing and future – as we ran a speedy audit to check on our contractual obligations across the business, and whether force majeure could help mitigate risks. Naturally we were approached by suppliers who wanted to deploy force majeure to excuse their obligations, too. A big learning curve, but a very effective buffer. Also, similar to other companies, we had to sort out furlough and office lockdown plans.

How have you maintained your team’s cohesion when you have been unable to see them face-to-face as regularly as usual?

We are a small and very close-knit team, so it was disappointing to be working remotely. That said, we quickly adapted to the technology we were given to support working from home, and pretty soon all our chats were by Teams rather than email. It brought an immediacy that can only be replaced by sitting next to one another. We had (and still have) weekly team catch ups to discuss anything but the law – mostly what box sets we were watching, to be fair! We’re a very busy team, and one initiative that really helped with that and team morale was the introduction of ‘quiet time’ for the legal team during the first lockdown. It gave everyone space in the day to do whatever they needed to, whether that was focusing on something horrid at work, or playing with the kids – no questions asked quiet time. That kind of support really helped.

In what ways do you see the in-house legal role evolving over the next few years?

Increasingly legal teams will need to adapt to remote working as businesses move to agile workforces, so team cohesion and project management will be a core focus for GCs. I’m also seeing law firms offering ‘legal tech’ to replace their services, which means it is an inevitable development for in house teams, and with it, I would expect in-house lawyers to be actively assess and question the tech, constantly test it and improve it, working with the provider, rather than rely on it.