Team Size: Six direct reports, 73 total team members

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

I oversee the end-to-end legal, regulatory, compliance, and cosec function for British Telecommunications outside of the United Kingdom and India. The team I manage is composed of 73 lawyers and engineers located spread across Europe, the Americas, the Republic of Ireland, Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa.

We operate in small teams situated in Dublin, Belfast, Reston, Dallas, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Bogota, London, New York, Paris, Madrid, Munich, Brussels, Amsterdam, Zurich, Milan, Rome, Budapest, Sydney, Perth, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, Dubai, and Johannesburg.

Could you share an example of a time when you came up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works and did not come at a large expense?

BT Legal utilises an online legal front door system to intake instructions. I overhauled the triage process for the Global Legal team, addressing both the auto-triage rules and the manual triage process, to effectively allocate matters within the BT in-house team and to our external managed services supplier, Factor. This is done according to geography, complexity, value, and matter type. Furthermore, I formulated the triage rules, collaborated with the legal ops team to design the online triage parameters, and led the team in implementing these changes across the Global Legal department.

How do you see the general counsel role evolving in South Africa over the next five-ten years?

The focus of the role is shifting from transactional support of the business to genuine ExCo and board-level business partnering, with an emphasis on outcomes management, leveraging the law to provide strategic support that enables desired outcomes. It also involves risk management, addressing regulatory risks – privacy, cloud, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence – as well as geopolitical and geo-economic risks. Additionally, the role encompasses legal operations management, incorporating AI, self-serve automation, legal process outsourcing, and managed legal services, among other aspects.

What are some of the key developments that have affected your business over the past year?

There is an aggressive move toward the regulation of a wide scope of issues, including data privacy and sovereignty, cloud solutions, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence. This is coupled with regulators starting to actively enforce regulations and impose sanctions, prompting risk/reward decisions around compliance barriers and market entry/exit.

The sustainability agenda is also gaining momentum and is creeping into customer and stakeholder requirements for commitment and disclosure. Furthermore, the ubiquitous presence of hyper-scalers in the telecommunications space creates substantial opportunities, specifically for first movers into digitisation.

We are also experiencing an increasingly aggressive cyber risk targeting customers across the spectrum, along with geopolitical and geo-economic tensions, including the cost-of-living crisis.