Team size: 50

What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

Comprising 50 staff members, the ESB in-house legal team supports ESB’s workforce of almost 9,000 employees. It is the first point of call for all legal issues arising in ESB’s domestic and international operations in generation, supply and transmission of electricity and in its energy consulting business.

The team provides legal assistance and support on a wide range of areas of law, focusing on corporate and commercial law; regulatory and competition law; employment and industrial relations law; litigation and dispute resolution; commercial property; and planning and environmental law. Other areas of practice include EU law, procurement law, data protection law, licensing law, company law and health and safety law.

How have you attempted to bring the legal department closer to your business colleagues?

At ESB, we recognise that having established our purpose and mission (which is to be recognised as playing a pivotal role in the delivery of ESB’s Net Zero Strategy by leading, advising and delivering in our particular areas of expertise), the next step is to consider how we will deliver on that mission – or more importantly, how our clients expect us to deliver.

We ascertain that in simple terms, by asking them. We meet with them regularly, via workshops and seminars, and conduct surveys, ensuring that our interactions with the business teams we support are not limited to only working on specific transactions or answering specific queries – the ‘legal work’ itself – but also include interactions and discussions on how we will deliver our services – and whether our clients are happy with the way in which we are doing so.

Have you used AI in your day-to-day work? If so, how useful do you find it?

We are fortunate that ESB is one of the first entities in Europe to be working with Microsoft on the deployment of Copilot for Microsoft 365 in our organisation. A number of our lawyers are part of a trial group that is leveraging this emerging technology alongside our existing Microsoft products, helping us to improve our work experience, support greater collaboration and ultimately, drive digital adoption.

While I do not believe AI is ready to draft complex legal advice, we are exploring its capabilities to better understand the improvements it can deliver for our legal staff, and we are already seeing improvements in summarisation, research, action tracking and collation of information, which I hope will ultimately enable our legal staff to focus on high-value activity.