United Kingdom 2018: The Team Elite
| Vodafone
Vodafone
| Vodafone Ireland
| Vodafone India
| Vodafone Portugal
Vodafone, one of the three major mobile phone network providers in Portugal, had strong growth in 2016, recently confirming 2.2% year-on-year service revenue improvements for Q3 2016 totaling €227m. The...
| Vodafone Qatar
Described as an ‘engaging team that deliver with speed-simplicity and trust’, Vodafone Qatar’s legal team is highly regarded in the region. Director of legal and regulatory, Matthew Osborne, is emphatic...
| Vodafone Ireland
Vodafone’s Irish business was created after the Vodafone Group acquired Eircell, the mobile network of Telecom Éireann. Since this time Vodafone Ireland has made an impression on the highly competitive...
| Vodafone
Vodafone Greece is a member of the Vodafone Group, one of the largest telecommunications groups in the world. Among mobile operator groups globally, Vodafone ranked fourth (behind China Mobile, Bharti...
| Vodafone Hutchison Australia
‘The ultimate goal of the Vodafone Hutchison Australia (VHA) legal team is to provide excellent and pragmatic advice and support, to ensure that Vodafone meets its objectives with acceptable levels...
| Vodafone Czech Republic
Jan Klouda, general counsel and member of the board of directors, leads a legal team at Vodafone Czech Republic that continues to impress due to its expertise and achievements in...
| Vodafone
Given the fast-paced nature of the telecommunications industry, Vodafone Qatar is continually required to evolve its business and its areas of commercial focus to ensure it keeps pace with a...
| Vodafone Ireland
With nine lawyers and one company secretary, Vodafone Ireland’s in-house legal function has grown significantly in recent years, as the company continues to innovate in new markets and technologies. Supported...
| Vodafone India
Vodafone India employs a sizeable operational legal team comprised of 55 in-house legal professionals based across the country. With an exciting blend of young and up-and-coming professionals and more experienced...
Led by one of the most respected GCs in the business, Rosemary Martin, the Vodafone legal team received a huge number of nominations for the 2018 GC Powerlist, with both private practice and corporate counsel offering support. Martin’s 500-strong legal team sprawls the globe and she highlights the importance of her regional divisions. In South Africa, Vodafone’s legal team has been involved in a major corporate mandate, selling a 5.2% stake in local mobile network operator Vodacom. Closer to home, significant matters include managing a network-sharing transaction with rival O2 – Project Beacon. Martin says: ‘We are sharing a network. From a technical and legal point of view, it’s difficult. There are competition issues – you have got to make sure you don’t fall foul of the Competition and Markets Authority. That was probably one of the biggest transactions that the UK legal team did.’ Vodafone is another trailblazer of the legal operations profession, with head of legal operations Steven Jebb occupying the role full-time since May 2017. He had previously held a number of different roles for Vodafone, including head of legal for technology and outsourcing, and head of enterprise legal for northern Europe. Martin says that Jebb and his team of two are charged with overseeing technological advancement at the company. Amy McConnell, another legal operations professional at Vodafone, has gone about reforming the way data is recorded. Prior to the last two years, little data was recorded internally. Since then, a range of metrics, such as the number of active deals and the number of disputes Vodafone is engaged in, have been indexed, resulting in budget savings of between 10% and 15% a year. Legal director Kerry Phillip says of Martin: ‘She does a wonderful job for diversity and making law firms take note. She is a huge fan of tech and what it can do to improve the life of an in-house lawyer. She’s very bold in how we should transform ourselves. She’s a great representative on the board and she’s very well accepted as the GC sounding board.’
