About

Team size: 200
Major law firms used: Addleshaw Goddard, BDB Pitmans, Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, CMS Cameron McKenna Nabarro Olswang, Dentons, DLA Piper, Eversheds Sutherland, Herbert Smith Freehills, Irwin Mitchell, Linklaters, Norton Rose Fulbright, Shakespeare Martineau

In 2017, the in-house legal team at National Grid agreed to reduce its spend by 25% over three years but group GC and company secretary Alison Kay says the function is on track to deliver a year early. ‘We are much more alive to who is working on a particular job,’ she comments. ‘Why have we got 19 lawyers from a firm working on a particular job that looks fairly straightforward? We look at each piece of work as a project or commodity and work with external firms to say: “We don’t need you for this bit; we can handle it in-house. This is where we need your expertise.” We’ve been much more strategic in the way we’ve looked at things.’

The change has mirrored a board-level initiative called Shaping Our Future. Kay’s next task is considering the organisational design of the 200-lawyer function to see whether it is fit for the future: checking whether it has the right mix between insourcing and outsourcing work, whether it has the right capability internally, where transactional work is best handled and what role automation and technology can play in that mix. She expects to implement the new structure by April, and says a key focus will be the internal and external mix, with the team still mostly outsourcing as much work as it did three years ago.

‘We want to free lawyers up from more routine work to do strategic and more interesting stuff; it takes a brave person to disagree with that philosophy. These things do require a huge amount of time and effort, however.’

Otherwise, the UK legal team has been busy with the next price controls set by energy regulator Ofgem, effective from 2021. Paul Hastings partner Roger Barron comments: ‘The role at National Grid is a wide-ranging one, given the transatlantic nature of its business, importance as a utility and operating as a FTSE 100-listed entity in a highly regulated sector. Alison is a great lawyer who is able quickly to understand the broadest range of issues and then hone in on what really matters to the commercial interests of her internal client. She’s unflappable and a person of great integrity, but is also good fun to work with, and a supportive and encouraging manager of her team. In short, she has all the skills you could imagine the ideal GC would possess.’

Kay believes the GC role will evolve to a point where anybody in that position will have necessarily spent time within a business role, rather than coming up through traditional legal lines: Kay was UK transmission commercial director at National Grid before becoming GC in 2012. ‘Having a good idea of who your customers are, of who your stakeholders are, which you don’t necessarily get when you’re siloed in your legal team, will become increasingly valuable,’ she comments. ‘The teams underneath GCs will change. There will be fewer lawyers, without a doubt, as the use of technology and automation increases.’