About

Team size: 12

Major legal advisers: Eversheds Sutherland, Latham & Watkins, Mills & Reeve

The legal industry has long grappled with a woeful record on diversity and inclusion, and social mobility. Rupa Patel, GC at Europe’s largest managed holiday rentals and resorts business, Awaze, is on a mission to change this.

Patel joined Awaze in mid-2019, having held GC roles at advertising company Exterion Media, customer feedback business TruRating and BPP University. At all of the organisations she has worked at, Patel has recruited and offered training contracts to people who have had a non-traditional route into the law and were unlikely to have got a training contract with a large City firm. She believes some people are overlooked for training contracts because of which university they attended, their grades and socio-economic background.

‘A lot of my trainees have gone on to work in private practice – they wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do that otherwise because that route is often closed to people with non-traditional backgrounds,’ she says. ‘Law firms have dismissed people that don’t have the right type of grades, instead of looking at the people and their willingness to work hard.’

Eversheds Sutherland partner Giles Dennison comments: ‘In all of her roles she has demonstrated clearly the tangible value and support that a proactive and business-focused GC can bring to an organisation; and she has also shown a real commitment to inclusivity and diversity, in particular social mobility and mentoring. It’s no coincidence that she creates teams who are very, very loyal to her.’

At Awaze, Patel leads a team of 12 and intends to implement a similar training scheme at the company, which in 2018 was bought by Platinum Equity for $1.3bn. She is also keen to promote more ethnic diversity in law, particularly women of colour. Mentoring and developing in-house team members is also a big part of Patel’s personal ethos and one she is trying to embed into her new team. A training contract in-house is a significant investment, particularly in terms of the time required for other team members to help in the trainee’s development, and so everyone must share the same beliefs on mentoring, Patel says.

‘One thing I do when I put together a team is to make sure that they’re all on the same page as me in terms of giving back. We want to make sure that the person that benefits from that genuinely wants to be a lawyer and wants to give the same level of commitment back in terms of learning and development. More diverse teams result in better decision making.’