About

Team size: Ten

Major legal advisers: CMS, Osborne Clarke, Slaughter and May, Travers Smith, Womble Bond Dickinson

OVO Energy has gone from a green energy start-up founded to challenge the UK’s Big Six providers to become the country’s third-largest supplier with five million customers in just a decade.

And the ink is barely dry on its most transformative deal yet – the £500m acquisition of Big Six provider SSE’s energy and home services business, adding 3.5 million of those customers and 8,000 staff. OVO had been valued at £1bn a few months before the deal, following investment from Mitsubishi Corporation.

‘We have had ten years of tremendous growth. It’s a real success story,’ group legal director Sanjay Verma comments. ‘The SSE deal gives us the platform to deliver the next generation of OVO to so many more people. We’re constantly thinking about structures we need to reflect the increasing maturity of the company, but at the same time we don’t want to lose the secret sauce – the entrepreneurial spirit, vision and speed that comes right from the top. We have got to strike a balance between maturing and not becoming too rigid.’

Verma joined OVO from Cognizant in May 2018, taking over from previous GC Daphne Yao as she moved into a chief of staff role with the company’s retail business. Since then, the company expanded internationally, including Spain, France and Australia, and a technology division called Kaluza was established, focused on using tech to intelligently connect devices and control energy consumption, and deliver back to the grid.

Throughout that time, the business operated with four lawyers, but has since expanded to ten after the SSE acquisition. Verma now has a group role overseeing all of OVO’s businesses and working on strategic projects, while Tom Coulson and Laura McVean manage the UK retail legal team. There is no formal external adviser panel, with Verma instead preferring to work with people that spend the time to understand OVO.

Verma says his lean legal team has had to adapt to moving at the same pace as the company generally, understanding the areas where it can use a lighter touch. He is focusing on integrating the SSE legal team over the next year, helping structure the right risk and compliance framework, as well as spending more time on international growth, working out what legal support those businesses need and how best to get it to them.

‘The team knows what’s right and what’s wrong, but also that what they had time to do last week, they might not have time for this week,’ he comments. ‘It’s about being super-efficient with your time and transferring knowledge into the teams we support – to empower them, but also because we’re not precious about anything. There are bright people everywhere and a lot of traditional “legal” tasks can be done by non-lawyers. That’s what’s keeping me here. There’s a tremendous wave of things that keep coming and you never quite know what’ll be next.’