‘This is, you will be pleased to know, a very, very, heavily regulated industry,’ defence multinational BAE Systems group GC Philip Bramwell says. ‘We have, from the boardroom down, no appetite for breaching laws or regulations.’ Bramwell, a veteran lawyer of more than 30 years, including time as GC at mobile operator O2, is enjoying his longest-ever stint in the same job after becoming BAE GC in 2007. This tenure has led to the development of a mature legal department, numbering around 250 people, split between lawyers and regulatory experts. The department is spread across the world, chiefly in the key markets of the UK, US, Australia, India and Saudi Arabia. This spread, for a company that employs more than 80,000 people overall, makes cohesion within the legal department an absolute must. This, Bramwell believes, is achieved through a clear understanding of legal valueadd, influenced by US academic Constance Bagley’s work, ‘Winning Legally: The Value of Legal Astuteness’. This is characterised as investing in the business to make it more ‘legally astute’, otherwise in-house demands will constantly be proportionate to the scale of the business, ‘the ultimate objective of which is to create a business that has a better knowledge of law and regulations than its competitors and is able to use that to its competitive advantage’. Bramwell tracks this with monthly value-add reports from his lawyers around the world, detailing things they have done that add to the company’s knowledge above and beyond the day job: in November, for instance, the team spent about 300 hours delivering online training to 5,000 people at the company. The ‘dream’ is to keep the business aware of legal developments, risks and regulations so that it in turn generates less work for the in-house department and improves efficiency overall. ‘The key with large multinational legal departments is controlling costs worldwide.’ BAE might spend seven years trying to win a contract for £5bn, but the classified nature of many of the headline projects the team has worked on means Bramwell cannot talk about them. He points to global chief counsel of compliance and regulation, Joanna Talbot, as worthy of mention, while head of labour law Victoria Halliday had an enormous workload not only because of a management restructure but with implementing the first phase of GDPR compliance. Bramwell expects the drive for efficiency to dominate for the foreseeable future, particularly for a company that ultimately supplies armed forces at the expense of the taxpayer. The team is not at the bleeding edge of technological development, as many solutions on the market are hosted in the Cloud, which presents security issues for BAE. ‘Although we look on enviously at what the banks and others are doing, and what the start-ups are doing, we’ve not yet found a package that will add a lot of value. It’s a bit frustrating really.’