Legal team size: 56
What are the main cases or transactions you have recently been involved in?
I manage the end-to-end legal, regulatory, compliance and cosec function for British Telecommunications plc outside of the United Kingdom and India. The team I manage is composed of 56 lawyers and engineers spread across Europe, the Americas, the Republic of Ireland, Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa. As a team we manage legal outcomes across 181 countries, with operations in 109 countries globally.
We are concentrated in small teams 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.
What is your approach to managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis?
Legal works on a “first responder” basis with the Risk and Business Continuity teams, participates in assessing the corporate and reputational risks, and as key members of the various Threat Action Response Groups, are involved on a daily/regular basis in the process of implementing mitigation measures.
Additionally, “never let a good crisis go to waste” is part of our value add. We look for learnings and opportunities to improve on process and policy as part of the outcome of the crisis.
Being on leadership teams at all levels of BT, the legal team is uniquely placed to continuously calibrate strategic support to the business, mirroring to the extent required changes in the risk appetite and desired outcomes dictated by the broader business, while ensuring calibration of the risk appetite to ensure shareholder value. Our guiding principle in this is to “maximise shareholder returns, within the wider regulatory environment”.
What are some of the main trends that are salient in your country currently?
Globally, there is an aggressive move toward regulation of a wide scope of issues, including data privacy & sovereignty, cloud solutions, cyber security and artificial intelligence. This is coupled with regulators increasing their scope (for example, Telco regulators taking on cyber regulations) and pro-actively enforcing regulations and imposing harsher sanctions, prompting risk/reward decisions around compliance barriers and market entry/exit.
The sustainability agenda is gaining momentum and is creeping into customer and stakeholder requirements for commitment and disclosure.
Softer issues of diversity, equity & inclusion and mental health & well-being of teams are becoming increasingly important, prompting change in management behaviours and ways of working within teams.
The ubiquitous presence of hyper-scalers in the telecommunications space creates substantial opportunities, specifically for first movers into digitisation.