About

Team size: 115

Major legal advisers: Charles Russell Speechlys, DLA Piper, Fieldfisher, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Herbert Smith Freehills

The general counsel (GC) and chief legal officer of Pearson, Bjarne Tellmann, has been on a sustained drive to more than halve his in-house legal department’s fixed costs over five years, achieving a reduction of close to 60%. Notably, his legal and compliance team’s headcount has dropped from 220 in 2014 to 115 today.

More recently, however, Tellmann led the setting up of a Transaction Services Centre, developed with external provider Morae Global, which provides internal and external resources for commercial transactions across Pearson’s businesses in North America, the UK, Australia, South Africa and India. He says this has improved standard processes, workflow and templates, and provides common technology platforms for legal services worldwide. ‘It’s moved us from being a distributor of inefficient models to one that is highly efficient. It also frees people up to do more strategic work.’

Tellmann has also set up what he calls a ‘special ops’ pool of small teams of professionals who can deliver services in a more agile way, rather than going externally to law firms or using alternative service providers for additional support. Volunteers from across the legal department are also given the opportunity to work on different projects, encouraging further collaboration. Associate GC for technology and strategy, Robert Mignanelli, was appointed to oversee a legal operations team, with Tellmann’s vision to create a four-tier structure – legal operations co-ordinating in-house lawyers, external law firms and alternative service providers – getting closer to reality with the appointment of an alternative service provider panel this year.

Pearson’s legal team also operates according to three tenets: do the right thing, have each other’s backs and be innovative. It has therefore introduced a number of initiatives regarding culture. One is Ethos, a culture group comprised of people from across the legal department, which allows junior team members to sit in on leadership meetings and report discussions to their colleagues and improve transparency. Another is Bravo, a reward and recognition system allowing anyone in the legal department to nominate colleagues for an on-the-spot reward of $100. Finally, Elevate is an internal mentoring programme in action since 2019, covering 50 people across five continents.

A culture code was also introduced to guide behaviour: ‘That’s designed to let everyone know what our values and beliefs are and how they reflect who we are,’ says Tellman. ‘The biggest challenge with all the change we have gone through has been in managing that change.’