Team size: Approximately 150

Did the pandemic lead to a lasting increase in the interaction your legal team has with the strategic plans of the company?

In short, yes.

The group legal team’s role has been rooted around supporting the organisation in sustaining its employees, stakeholders and host community. The pandemic has allowed us to become value accretive strategic partners to the business. By being truly focused on doing the right thing, living our values, and helping the company make bold decisions, group legal has cemented its role as a key advisor and partner in the successful delivery of business outcomes.

The strengthened relationships and increased connectivity forged during this period have enabled group legal to continue its work in supporting on those items of strategic importance.

In general, what would you like to see change about the external law firms you use?

The first thing to be said is that our firms and broader ecosystem do a great job collaborating with us in delivering comprehensive legal support to the business. We have several firms and jurisdictions in which we need to be able to mobilise expertise.

At a strategic level, our message to external law firms would be to be more challenging, and do not focus only on those matters in which you are providing specific support.

External law firms should be genuine partners and take an active role in successfully delivering the strategies of their client’s legal functions through genuine knowledge sharing, proactive points of view, and by helping legal functions learn from one another. Firms have a unique role in having visibility within and across sectors. Using that position to help connect, define and solve specific challenges is where we see full-service firms bringing the most value.

We would suggest bringing the power of your firms proactively through a more tactical lens. We often hear of complementary capabilities of firms, but when mobilising matters, we do not see them bringing those skills to matters ‘as the norm’. We expect our firms to create suitable, cost-effective structures and delivery models to deliver the outcomes most efficiently; the market can do more in this space.

Firms should also be more mindful of cost certainty and be invested in outcomes: the era of ‘legal is just an expense’, and the cost ‘is what it is’ no longer has a place in progressive organisations. The ability to provide improved cost certainty has become a deal-breaker.

The role of corporate teams is to bring to life the law for the benefit of our stakeholders and organisations. The firms which provide clear, actionable advice and points of view are the most valuable. Opinion, albeit expert, which is full of caveats and conditionality to the extent it becomes inaccessible, does not serve a business outcome; it serves to create fees without the result in mind.