About

Team size: 19

Major legal advisers: Bristows, Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, DLA Piper, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, Pinsent Masons, RPC

It’s been a landmark year for the Financial Times (FT), according to GC Dan Guildford, as the business reached one million subscribers. The growth of subscriptions has led to the setting up of a low-cost hub in Belfast to handle a greater volume of work: ‘The team has been incredibly productive in ensuring
that the legal department deals with client contract negotiations rapidly, efficiently and effectively,’ he comments.

The FT legal team supports the business across corporate subscriptions, content licensing and event sponsorship departments, and the team has developed FT template contracts that are used for contract negotiations. Guildford manages the company secretarial and compliance teams across London, Belfast and Manila.

That Belfast presence has slowly been built out over several years, now housing four lawyers. Higher-value contracts were often subject to intense negotiation that required the involvement of an FT lawyer, but Guildford says providing that support from London was becoming increasingly difficult to justify commercially. They researched the Northern Irish market, including firms and some other in-house teams that have established bases there, and concluded it would be more efficient to carry out template-based work from the FT’s subsidiary office in Belfast.

Belfast lawyers spend a week in London when they join to meet their colleagues and get an understanding of the FT’s culture, while a senior FT lawyer regularly visits Belfast to ensure everything is running smoothly and so that it is not made to feel like a satellite office. ‘We realised that we needed to get the buy-in of the business to make this work and so spent time explaining how this would work and the benefits to the business, such as having their own experienced and dedicated lawyers,’ Guildford comments. ‘Even a relatively small in-house department can improve its processes to make the team more effective and efficient. Most importantly, thanks to the hard work and dedication of the entire team, the project is viewed as a success by the FT business.’

Simultaneously, Guildford has been reviewing a wide array of technology options in a bid to increase productivity, allowing the legal team to maintain a quality of life. Some early attempts, such as working offline with privacy screens while commuting, were more about working longer hours still, which was not the point: ‘None of us wanted a team that was regularly working late into the evening.’

As such, Guildford brought in a consultant to help the team shortlist and interview potential tech providers, as well as involving his entire team in the process of testing and interviewing solutions to ensure everybody was engaged.

‘The team is trialing the Avokka contract creation and workflow tool as well as DocJuris, a piece of software which helps to review and redline contracts. We have a long way to go, but as a small in-house team without a dedicated legal ops person, we are pleased with the considerable progress we have made in the space of a few months.’