The young, bright GC and company secretary of The Crown Estate, Rob Booth, has ‘gone from being one to watch to being a big player’ since taking over from well-regarded former GC Vivienne King in 2016, one law firm leader says. ‘He’s really stepped up to that role.’ Booth and his lean team of five lawyers have certainly stepped up: supporting more than £2bn worth of property trading at The Crown Estate in the last two years, overhauling its offshore wind portfolio, devolving its operations in Scotland and restructuring the entity, which is governed by an Act of Parliament. Booth sits in the middle of the legal function, with four senior legal counsel below him who each manage one of the estate’s portfolios: central London; regional; energy, infrastructure and minerals; and rural and coastal. The overall portfolio is worth more than £13bn, with central London by far the largest, making up about £8bn of that in super-prime West End property. One of Booth’s first tasks when he took on the GC role was to rewrite a lot of the estate’s governance. He took the opportunity to change the structure of his legal team at the same time. He describes this process as effectively ripping up the estate’s terms of reference and replacing it with a more modern structure that has been embedded over the past 18 months: ‘It’s one of those moments as a Crown Estate GC where you know in six months either there’s a happy stakeholder or you’re packing your possessions into a box. My possessions are still on my desk.’ The restructuring also gave Booth an opportunity to restructure his panel, which he believes is as good as any on the market. The Crown Estate’s heavily-outsourced legal spend will be between £10m and £15m this year, and there is a requirement for panel firms to be very bespoke and transparent. Booth has also divided the work between strategic and portfolio mandates, which he says has resulted in improved performance. One legal consultant says The Crown Estate is the best legal team they saw last year: ‘The maturity of how they’re managing the supply base – they’ve really thought it through in terms of what they’re trying to get out of the law firms. I’ve been very impressed by that.’ Booth sees his team’s role existing beyond simply aiding transactional flow: ‘We are there to optimise, to shape and to assist the business to be the best that it can be.’ Booth prefers firms come to him with technological innovation than for him to have to commit to any specific system, particularly as he considers the legal technology market too immature to offer something that tips the scale. ‘I’m very happy to sit back and utilise what the firms are using. I’m a Millennial, so I’m not about buying stuff; I’m all about rent.’