About

Team size: 10
Major law firms used: DLA Piper

In 2017, the UK arm of global brewing giant Heineken made a substantial £403m acquisition of around 1,900 pubs owned by Punch Taverns. The transaction effectively doubled the size of Heineken’s pub company to the point where it is now bigger than the brewing business at more than 2,700 pubs. For Lynsey Nicoll, Heineken’s acting head of legal for the past year, bringing those pubs into the business has dominated the workload.

‘We’ve been integrating everything by growing the internal team to manage the pub business, and developing systems and processes that go with that, and managing the additional volume of work. It’s been great but challenging.’

Nicoll leads an in-house legal team of ten, the size of which has doubled since she arrived seven years ago. The company has a sole-adviser mandate in place with DLA Piper, first instigated in 2015 and renewed for another two years in 2018. Nicoll and former head of legal, Graeme Colquhoun (who has been seconded to an internal project), led on establishing the relationship.

Heineken saved more than £1.5m in the first three years of the arrangement, reducing overall spend by about 30%. The main categories of work have been in property and licensing for pubs, intellectual property and employment – all on fixed-fee retainers – and specialist corporate and commercial advice, provided at capped fees per project.

‘We’re continually looking at improvements there,’ Nicoll comments. ‘It’s generally good, but we’re always looking at ways to be more efficient.’

The legal team is proactive on developing relationships across its business. Nicoll says the overarching philosophy is to be seen as a team that can help the business achieve its objectives, rather than being blockers. ‘The main focus for us is trying to manage and sustain the business-as-usual stuff in the most efficient way possible to free up our time dealing with all these change and strategic projects across the business, because we’re not planning to grow the team, but work smarter.’