About

Alan Johnston, chief counsel and company secretary, leads the Liberty Insurance legal team of two lawyers and one support staff member. He describes it as ‘a lean legal team’, and since 2016 it has transformed from a one-person legal function into a three lawyer in-house legal team and a key branch of the wider Liberty Group legal community. Johnston highlights that the team’s small size ‘has not hindered us, but in fact has helped us to be more agile and innovative. We have learned fast how and when optimally to utilise new tools and technology to assist us’. Examples of the technology and tools it uses are an e-data room, Accellion, to give multiple-parties any time access to large volume contract databases and due diligence data, and a bespoke e-data room of all documents and emails collated for the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) industry wide investigation. The team has also created a new online contracts database to support all business functions with contract management and a new online legal report which is updated in real time to track the team’s work in progress with status and top priorities. The Liberty Group is re-organising its business operations and markets in Europe during 2018. The team is working on over 40 different work streams to effect the merger and transfer to Spain e.g. pensions, HR (TUPE), licensing, IP, Tax, due diligence, capital reduction, share transfers in order for Liberty Insurance Ireland to become a subsidiary to Liberty Spain. The team has also dealt with impactful new legislation increasing the regulatory monitoring of legal departments in Ireland, namely the GDPR and EU Insurance Distribution Directive. The impact has been tremendous, but the team has risen to it. In particular, Johnston highlights two of his team members. Deirdre Canavan, legal counsel, joined in June 2016 with 14 years of experience as an in-house legal counsel in global organisations. Johnston says that ‘Deirdre helped to shape and evolve the Liberty legal team in Ireland to become an efficient, lean and solution focused in-house legal team [and specifically] overhauled the contract management system in Liberty Insurance’. James O’Higgins, legal counsel, joined in September 2017 following a stint in the corporate department of a Magic Circle law firm in London. Johnston identifies that his ‘experience as an M&A lawyer has proved useful [in the merger], and brought his technological knowledge to bear with the use of e-data rooms’.