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The National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) has one of the largest in-house legal teams in Ireland, with 48 individuals across four divisions: residential delivery; deleveraging; litigation, asset management and investments; and legal projects and services. Head of legal Alan Stewart explains that, while the legal team is keen to be innovative, its work is always undertaken within the framework of the company’s business goals. ‘The key area for innovation is that we do try to work hand in glove with the business’, he explains, ‘which is helped by the fact that the business is very good at listening to the legal team. Overall, we want the legal team to be involved and thinking about strategy along with adopting new techniques’. In terms of project work, Stewart reports the team has worked on ‘some very large secured asset sales that had a lot of complexities’, that ‘GDPR is another area that [the team has] taken the lead on’, and that it has ‘worked with the business to streamline processes relating to lending work’ – a very healthy body of successful work completed. The team culture that has contributed to this is based on having very strong interpersonal relationships within the team and a strong collaborative culture, these factors accounting significantly for the very strong staff retention at NAMA. Stewart also explains that NAMA’s position as a “bad bank” provides unique challenges to him and other legal managers: ‘Essentially, the better we sell assets, the less work we have. Trying to motivate staff in this situation requires thinking outside the box. We do this by making sure a good variety of work is available, so that when they leave NAMA they will have a good range of experience that will put them into another good job very soon after. For instance, we train our people up in accountancy and business areas as well as legal’.