About

Team size: Nine

Major legal advisers: Burges Salmon, Eversheds Sutherland, Gowling WLG, Mayer Brown, Osborne Clarke, Pinsent Masons, Shoosmiths

FTSE 250 developer and regeneration company, St Modwen Properties, laid out a strategic overhaul of its business in mid-2017, opting to sell off retail and other non-core assets in favour of focusing on three core business units: residential; industrial and logistics; and strategic land and regeneration.

Around the same time, the company appointed its first general counsel (GC), and lawyer, Andrew Eames. He joined after a stint as interim GC and company secretary at Mothercare and following more than a decade at investment bank Nomura, where he rose to co-head of corporate legal and company secretary.

Eames took on responsibility for legal, governance, risk, insurance and business integrity, and has since grown his team to nine, alongside a few outsourced areas of work to providers such as Lawyers On Demand and RSM UK. He was tasked with designing an executive governance framework in line with the company’s reorganisation and strategic shift.

‘We had a good board governance framework because it’s a listed plc,’ Eames comments. ‘But because of the changes the company had gone through, we needed to make it transparent, with crystal clear accountabilities from the board down throughout the organisation. It’s not only been designing and putting it in, but setting it up and making it work, then making sure the rest of the organisation understood and got involved with it.’

For example, the company now has a clear line of sight to where responsibility lays in areas such as risk governance, environmental liabilities and health and safety. ‘I’m helping co-pilot the business units to maximise opportunities and minimise risk,’ says Eames. ‘It was important they understood what their business unit risks were and got full ownership of those while then understanding how I and the team can support them.’

Osborne Clarke partner Will James adds: ‘He’s had to work carefully with internal stakeholders within a traditional property development company to develop new governance procedures that withstand the closest public scrutiny. These days, prudent legal leaders and executive management must plan for worst-case scenarios and ensure their response to any critical situation will be open and transparent, and their handling of it beyond criticism. Andrew has tackled the challenge with creativity and diplomacy.’

Eames has also put a lot of work into the firm’s relationships with its external advisers, many of which have worked with the company for decades but never interfaced with a legal team at St Modwen. That has been about moving them from a relationship based on execution – such as a property deal – to ongoing strategic support aligned with the company’s three business units.

‘We’ve got a big external spend and it is vital for us, because of our model of outsourcing a lot, that those people we partner with are the right people and have shared values,’ he comments. ‘The law firms have been great and they have an opportunity to help us achieve our objectives over the next five years, but they have to be fully engaged and committed to us over that time. It’s only over the last year there’s been a big shift, but it’s a continuous work in progress.’