About

Suzanne Tucker, general counsel at EY Ireland leads the legal team of five lawyers covering all elements of in-house legal matters for the company. She oversees a team that covers a variety of practice areas, meaning that over the past two years, some of the issues that it has dealt with include large scale litigation, regulatory investigations and developments including GDPR, the acquisition of a new business and assisting and guiding the business through internal structural change. The management at EY Global, the global parent company of the Irish firm, have established a global portal for the worldwide EY legal community. Tucker has identified that ‘this has proved to be a useful know-how repository, facilitating a degree of knowledge sharing that was not previously possible’. This global portal is supported by regular calls and training sessions on a wide range of topics, delivered to a global EY legal audience by various in-house subject matter experts. Tucker identifies that EY continues to focus on and develop its use of mobile technology. Whilst this may have been developed initially to assist its colleagues out on client site, the team has benefitted from an ability to work anywhere, at any time. Tucker adds that this lends a welcome degree of flexibility to the working day of each of the team’s lawyers. The business in Ireland has increased recently requiring the legal team to take on a new hire to deal with increased demand. Tucker highlights that external trends have also been challenging: ‘A booming Irish financial services economy means it can be difficult to attract and retain the right people – both within the legal function and across the wider business. GDPR has been a big challenge – both in terms of preparatory work and ongoing requests from our internal clients. A further regulatory change arises from the European audit reforms, specifically around auditor independence requirements. And of course, there’s Brexit – with the uncertainty that continues to engender, both in the Irish market and in our dealings with our UK colleagues’.