About

Alan Daly, group head of legal at ESB, Ireland’s state-owned energy company, joined in May 2011 and has since led the team to an exceptional level. He has overall responsibility for ESB’s in-house legal team of 50 staff, who provide legal advice and transactional support to all core areas of ESB’s businesses in Ireland and abroad, including ESB International, ESB’s international engineering consulting business. Daly is an Irish solicitor with extensive Irish and international experience. One of his first actions at ESB was to consolidate and centralise legal professionals with expertise in similar practice areas into specialist centres of excellence. Following a review of the legal function’s organisation, we organised our in-house legal team to greater optimise its resources to meet the demands of its ESB Group clients and to facilitate greater sharing of knowledge and expertise across six core practice areas; those being six core areas of legal practice; corporate and commercial law, regulatory and competition law, employment and industrial relations law, litigation and dispute resolution, commercial property, and planning and environmental law. He identifies that he has ‘overall functional responsibility for the in-house legal team, assisted by four experienced senior legal managers, each of whom specialises in a specific area of legal practice. Using modern collaborative tools such as Sharepoint, the in-house legal team members and legal managers efficiently allocate and prioritise client requests. The structure allows for the mobilisation of legal project teams to assist clients on projects such as joint venture wind-farm developments, using and pulling together solicitors and legal executives with different specialisms such as (in this example), specialists in conveyancing, commercial, regulatory and planning and environmental laws’. Since joining ESB, Daly has been very focussed on leading a change which sees ESB’s legal professionals spend less time and effort on the reactive provision of legal services and more time and effort on proactively developing roles as trusted advisers to the businesses they serve. In the past year he has led a series of workshops to consider and revamp our mission statement and to establish, and design strategies to support the team’s vision, which is to be recognised across ESB as playing a pivotal role in enabling the achievement of our client’s strategic initiatives. In conjunction with this initiative, he is looking to deploy new practice management and other technologies to improve efficiencies and enhance operational excellence. Daly highlights that, ‘we take pride in the fact that while external law-firms typically profess themselves to be client focused and express the desire to better understand their clients’ business(es), that is taken as a given in the case of the ESB in-house legal team, which has advised on and helped shape (including most recently with the successful introduction of the iSem in Ireland) the very sector in which ESB operates in Ireland’. Daly and his legal team have been recognised in the GC Powerlist: Ireland since 2015; his team at ESB was recognised in 2016 and has been highlighted in other industry awards.