Team size: three permanent staff (excluding GC) – 2 lawyers and 1 Compliance and Corporate Governance Coordinator

Key team members : Claire M. Murphy, Louise O’Connor, Caitlín Love, Emma Armitage

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

Our legal team is ultimately involved in four main areas of business; commercial contract management, legal advisory, regulation and compliance and horizon scanning. Our team are true strategic business partners, not simply ‘pen pushers’. As lawyers, we have a privileged position as we have visibility across most areas in the business and this makes us ideally placed to ask questions, to ‘join the dots’ and influence the direction/effectiveness of a project. We have been involved in numerous strategic projects over the past year such as the expansion of Enet’s own network infrastructure including the recently announced €50m+ expansion in fibre networks in multiple locations around Ireland to connect major commercial, retail and industrial zones. In addition to this, the team continues to monitor and govern the contractual framework overseeing Enet’s involvement in the National Broadband Plan, one of the most significant telecommunications projects in recent times.

Some of the key contracts completed by the team recently include advising on high value dark fibre, IRU and service contracts with major telecommunication providers, completion of government contracts on foot of successful tender applications, advising on a new services agreement with a high-profile blue-chip company and successful re-contracting with several contractors including Total Splicing Solutions to aid facilitation of network expansion.

We operate in a heavily regulated environment which is constantly evolving. To stay compliant but also competitive, the business is increasingly required to demonstrate what it does from a compliance, governance and sustainability perspective in order to do business. This requires investment of time and money and, at times, it can be a challenge to get stakeholder buy-in. However, we see the evolving landscape as an opportunity for legal to get involved, to showcase our value and collaborate with the business. We need to stay up to date and monitor the horizon, so knowledge acquisition, management and distribution is an integral part of the way we work. We go above and beyond our CPD obligations and invest in strategies to keep us up to date on developments in the law and other related areas affecting our clients.

Additionally, over the past 12 months, a key additional transaction for the Speed Fibre Group which heavily involved the legal team was our restructuring/refinancing deal. This was essentially an ‘amend and extend’ of our existing finance facility and, as would be expected, involved a number of different stakeholders in the business, dealing with due diligence and additional contractual frameworks to secure the additional finance.

Has the increasing consciousness of climate change and sustainability affected your company and the team’s priorities, and if so how?

ESG coming under the remit of the legal team was a natural fit for our business given the GC has responsibility for governance, legal, EH&S and HR matters. The legal team has an opportunistic viewpoint of having an intrinsic understanding of risk together with the oversight element of being involved with all functions and departments. The legal team use their knowledge of the business and their understanding of ESG principles to give the right advice for ongoing sustainability – both commercially but also environmentally and socially.

ESG takes a top-down approach in Enet with ESG related topic being common board agenda items, for example, health and safety, environment, people, etc. Considerable work has been conducted over the past years to enhance ESG factors being considered in all decision-making practices in the business but more particularly in respect of energy performance, greenhouse gas emissions, health and safety, customer satisfaction, and employee engagement as we identified these as our most significant ESG impact areas in a materiality assessment. ESG-related targets have also become a common occurrence on senior management and ELT objectives.

Our industry has by its nature relatively little direct negative impact on the environment. However, wherever we can we aim to reduce our negative impact and increase our positive where possible. A key objective for 2023 is our exploring and finalising a Pathway to Net-Zero for the business.

We are also currently undertaking a UNSDG alignment exercise with a view to becoming B-Corp certified in the future. The UN Sustainable Development Goals have become a widely recognised set of goals that all businesses can align to and many now report globally on performance and contribution towards the goals. The legal team recognizes the benefit to alignment to these values and as such are driving this objective forward as a business imperative.

We recognize the importance of external benchmarking and voluntary disclosure, and we chose to voluntarily report our efforts to GRESB (Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark) which is an internationally recognised rating agency. This gave us a framework to ensure best in class practices were adopted at an environmental, social and governance level, and enabled us to set clear KPIs, transparently report, and benchmark our efforts to help us understand how we can make further progress. In 2022, we reported to GRESB and received a 5-star rating, a score of 96/100, and came second in our category in Europe. These KPIs demonstrated that we are performing well against peers not only in Ireland but also across Europe and further afield. In further recognition of our commitment to ESG we have also achieved certification with various ISO standards such as ISO45001 (Environmental Management), ISO14001 (Occupational Health & Safety) and ISO9001 (Quality Management Systems).