About

Team size: 14

Major legal advisers: Bird & Bird, Clifford Chance, Fieldfisher, Jones Day, Steptoe & Johnson

The services sector makes up more than 70% of the EU’s gross domestic product. But due to what was seen as a fragmented approach to contracting services, the European Commission and European Free Trade Association in 2016 gave a mandate to the European Committee for Standardization to develop a standard for the three different phases of providing services: procurement, contracting and execution. Enter Christian Fahey, at the time a senior associate at Baker McKenzie but from late 2016 an in-house lawyer at satellite telecoms company Inmarsat.

‘The EU saw this as a big area where standardisation would be more effective than legislation,’ he comments. ‘My interest was in the contracting phases and asking: “What does a good contract look like?”’

Fahey has been involved from the start of the project, helping set up a working group ultimately tasked with establishing a non-binding standard for service contracts and involving input from more than 20 countries as to what constitutes best practice. Fahey, as an expert contributor and co-author, has helped write the standard, ‘Services Contracts – Guidance for the design content and structure of contracts’, which is about to go for a final vote before publication. ‘That’s been an incredibly eye-opening process and difficult at times, but we’re at the final stages of getting it over the line. It’s been incredibly rewarding.’

Simultaneously, Fahey has risen to vice president of legal affairs at Inmarsat, which in late 2019 completed its £2.6bn sale to a consortium led by buyout giants Apax Partners and Warburg Pincus alongside Canada’s CPP Investment Board and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board. The legal team’s headcount sits at 14, including three in the US, with Fahey’s responsibility predominantly for the company’s aviation business unit. His day job includes negotiating multimillion-dollar, long-term contracts with international airlines to provide broadband connectivity to airplanes, through its Global Xpress network and European Aviation Network. There is also a public private partnership with the European Space Agency looking to replace air traffic control radio communication systems with satellite communication, which aims to improve the safety and efficiency of air traffic control.

He has also taken the legal lead on a number of internal transformation initiatives – a technology infrastructure overhaul project called OneIT, which replaced the company’s systems, servers and networks; the company’s GDPR response; and a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) programme to provide self-serve capability to the business for standard NDAs.

‘It’s a dynamic company and as a result the legal team’s having to stay relevant and become more innovative,’ he comments. ‘One of my other hats is to keep abreast of legal operations, technology improvements and the like. All the projects I’ve been involved with have the intent of making it quicker and easier to do business.’