You do not have to be an aviation geek to join the lean British Airways (BA) in-house legal team, but head of legal and company secretary Andrew Fleming believes the combination of the airline’s brand and the nature of the work attracts strong talent regardless, allowing him to be picky about who he hires: ‘That’s an advantageous starting point. The nature of the industry we work in, the whole variety and unpredictability of the work, makes it really challenging, but that also keeps it interesting for everyone.’ Fleming – head of legal since the £5bn merger of BA and Spanish carrier Iberia in 2011 – has a 26-strong inhouse legal team covering employment, commercial, regulatory, litigation and competition, mostly based in the UK with a team of four in New York. One partner at a major global firm says the BA team is constantly moving from one big, high-profile issue to another: ‘There’s quite a lot of crisis management that it handles very effectively.’ In the last year or so, the BA team faced industrial action, the acquisition of take-off and landing slots at Gatwick Airport and the closure of its largest pension scheme. One of the more high-profile issues was the long-running mixed-fleet industrial action in 2017, resulting in strikes by some BA cabin crew before a pay deal was reached in October. The acquisition of the slots at Gatwick followed the collapse of low-cost airline Monarch, which was secured for an undisclosed sum. Meanwhile, BA’s largest defined-benefit pension scheme closed to future accrual to be replaced with a new flexible benefits scheme. Fleming highlights head of employment Navdeep Deol for his work on employment matters, and head of regulatory, competition and litigation Elizabeth Hichens for her work in the acquisition of the Monarch Airlines slots. Competition lawyer Natasha Franklin, meanwhile, is also well regarded. The team is open-minded about doing things differently, but innovation and technology will be more of a focus for this year. That said, it was a relatively early adopter of e-billing in late 2011 and has implemented other process-efficiency tools. Fleming believes the team is a true trusted adviser to the broader BA business: ‘Being really smart and good at the law bit has become a given and it has been increasingly about how you can put that into effect. It’s about having an intimate familiarity with the business, really understanding how you make money and what your brand is built on.’ Linklaters partner Tom Cassels says Fleming is extremely bright and willing to challenge external counsel in a constructive way. He adds: ‘It’s a very lean team that is always stretched, but that isn’t reflected in the quality of their work. They manage outside counsel well.