About

Andrew Cooke welcomes the varied nature of his role as general counsel of FLASH Entertainment, the region’s premier live events company. Indeed, he recalls being thrown in at the deep end from the start. ‘In December 2011, when I was less than six months into the job, we delivered a two-day dance music festival, an international tennis tournament, a Sade concert at one venue and a Coldplay concert at another (which we built on a beach in three weeks)’. Despite the demanding schedule, Cooke’s extensive legal groundwork made the difference during this busy month. ‘The new processes I’d implemented on joining held up’, he explains: ‘The business needs were met, we maintained a phenomenal turnaround time and tracked everything using a metrics programme. Even to this day, we use that month as a case study to showcase our delivery capabilities.’ Among other career highlights, he cites being part of the team that saw Flash Entertainment win bids to deliver the FIFA Club World Cup UAE 2017/18 and the AFC Asian Cup UAE 2019. FLASH is known for delivering un-missable events and these achievements ‘place FLASH in the top-tier of sports delivery agencies in the world’. Cooke is also proud of his role as mentor to fellow members of the FLASH Entertainment legal team, some of whom have gone on to win recognition and awards within the industry. Cooke prizes a data-led and process-focused approach to legal service delivery. ‘In my first 18 months, I invested a lot of time in volume management and tracking’, he recalls. ‘We saw a return on that investment very quickly, as the business’ basic legal needs were being met in a predictable way. Six years on, the overall impact of our approach has been to democratise what we do: the team understands our supply chain, and where we are best placed in theirs. We’re part of the ecosystem.’ As for how to build an effective legal team, Cooke has studied extensively how leadership and engagement affect team performance, and is a regular author and speaker on the subject. ‘As the American leadership coach Marshall Goldsmith puts it, we all need to recognise the difference between achievements that happen because of what we do, and achievements that happen despite what we do. An example of this: senior staff assuming they are strong leaders because junior staff follow their instructions. This could be evidence of strong leadership, but it could also be evidence of leveraging hierarchy. It’s incumbent on all of us to understand the difference between the two and how it might affect our ability to create ethical, engaged, innovative teams’.