Team size: 53

How important is choosing to work with external lawyers who align with your company’s values?

It is very important to us. For example, we have pushed hard over the last 12 to 18 months to get more data from our preferred law firms around what approach is best regarding inclusion, diversity, and wellbeing. I am passionate about the inclusion and diversity agenda, and I’m also the sponsor for our ethnicity network at Nationwide called ‘race together’. We are also signed up to the ‘mindful business charter’, to bring more common sense to how lawyers expect other lawyers to respond to questions and demands for advice. We cannot just try and do good as individual law firms or in-house teams, we have got to come together on this, otherwise the needle won’t move.

As we enter the next decade, what skills will the corporate legal team need to succeed in the modern in-house industry?

They must be much more responsive to artificial intelligence as well as the rapidly changing legal and regulatory landscape. The next few years are expected to be economically tough, and the cost pressure will come down on every in-house legal function. The legal function will have to focus on how to demonstrate its value to the organisation, which may mean being thoughtful about when to engage external law firms and the cost involved. We emerged as one of the most cost-effective teams in terms of our peers in retail financial services, in a recent survey by PwC.

It is also increasingly important for junior lawyers to get far better at presenting advice and thoughts instantaneously and verbally. Lawyers should also adapt to thinking in numbers, just like other executives, and get more comfortable reading charts and graphs.

The unusual business environment created by the pandemic has been swiftly followed by the Ukraine crisis, and attendance supply chain costs rising and increasing inflation. Are you now putting more emphasis on preparing for the unforeseen, and if so, what does this entail?

We are putting more emphasis on the unforeseen beyond simply recognising that the unforeseen is now daily occurrence. There is a limited amount to which you can plan for the unforeseen, other than have a team that is able to react to, recognise the right questions to ask and where to find the answers at speed. This is precisely the value of having a more senior team which will have experience of managing unusual circumstances.

Mark Chapman