About

Team size: 45
Major law firms used: Allen & Overy, Ashurst, Bird & Bird, Burges Salmon, Dentons, Harbottle & Lewis, Herbert Smith Freehills, Macfarlanes, RPC, Womble Bond Dickinson

Virgin Media GC Mine Hifzi has a simple agenda for her 45-strong legal team across the UK and Ireland: provide deep expertise and commercial thinking, while avoiding the ‘boring bunch’ legal stereotype.

And since she took the role in 2013 after the company overhauled its executive following a £15bn acquisition by Liberty Global, Hifzi believes the type of person an in-house lawyer is has become critical. ‘What I increasingly experience is that our commercial colleagues want someone who is easy to do business with, someone who is flexible in their thinking and someone who can be pragmatic about risk.’

Hifzi was previously senior vice president of commercial and legal affairs for Scripps Networks Interactive, and spent 14 years heading up the international legal and government affairs team at Discovery Communications. She is credited with overhauling Virgin Media’s legal team, which has grown from 30 people since the Liberty acquisition.

The company has 5.9 million cable customers and 3.1 million mobile service subscribers, with revenue of nearly £5bn in 2017. Hifzi says the vast majority of legal work – including commercial agreements – is done in-house, with retainers used for repetitive work (there is an employment retainer with RPC, for example) to ensure the team can be nimble to changing business needs.

One of Hifzi’s first objectives when she joined was to embed the lawyers more fully into the business. This is achieved by basing the team across London and Hook, in Hampshire (which will soon move to Reading) to match where different business divisions are located. Being part of Liberty also creates opportunities, with lawyers moving to and from the central functions to gain experience. ‘We need to grow our lawyers and therefore need to create the bandwidth for them to focus on matters critical to the growth of the company. We encourage our lawyers to work with the business to design procedures to ensure we spend the most time on the opportunities that drive the most value. For example, we work on litigation matters together with our claims team where we leverage the necessary expertise.’

Hifzi has also instigated what she calls the Legal Power Hour – fortnightly training sessions with external providers on both technical legal skills and softer skills like communication and wellbeing. This doubles as a time for the in-house team to share experiences from particular deals or work.

‘My style is very much dictated by my core values: fairness, authenticity, inclusivity and family. I am a great believer in listening to the opinions of others and letting others be leaders in their own right by taking the decisions themselves. We have some of the best subject-matter experts in our industry and I thrive on being surrounded by smart people; we spark off each other.’