About

Team size: 28
Major law firms used: McKenzie, DWF, Fladgate, Herbert Smith Freehills, Shepherd and Wedderburn, Slaughter and May

‘I went from banker to in-house lawyer to barrister to grocery retailer,’ says Ocado group GC Neill Abrams. ‘It’s not what you would call a planned career path, but each of the things I’ve done have taught me something valuable.’

Abrams has been with the FTSE 100 online supermarket since its launch in 2000, after being approached by former Goldman Sachs colleagues Tim Steiner, Jason Gissing and Jonathan Faiman to join the company. Abrams had been a financial analyst at the bank before taking on an in-house legal role there, latterly spending more than two years at the Bar with One Essex Court before joining the start-up.

Since then, Ocado raised £200m in a 2010 initial public offering, signed deals with other supermarkets to launch their online delivery services and has grown to more than 14,000 employees. Its revenue in 2018 exceeded £1.5bn, proving a lucrative journey for Abrams: he sold more than £8m in company shares in the middle of last year.

‘I was the legal team for several years. The company grew quite quickly, so I was involved in absolutely everything we did, from raising equity to negotiating bank loans to buying a photocopier. I’ve been part of every business conversation and every board meeting, which has made it very easy to be close to the executive.’

Abrams still shares an office with the executive, but his legal team has grown to 28 staff and his role more specified to cover legal, insurance, risk management, human resources and corporate responsibility. In the past 18 months he restructured the legal department into the three pillars of legal, governance and intellectual property. He also employed a legal operations head to focus on improving efficiency.

‘My ability to grow as a leader depends on how my direct reports can grow as leaders. I had to do something to enable that to happen, so we changed the way the department was set up and gave a senior lawyer responsibility for each of those pillars.’

Slaughter and May led on Ocado’s IPO, but otherwise Abrams prefers to keep as much work as possible in-house, including when striking a deal with Morrisons to effectively ‘white label’ Ocado’s technology and distribution platform, and more recently when Ocado secured a similar partnership with America’s second-biggest supermarket chain, Kroger.

‘When you begin life as a start-up, you think in a particular way and that is to not spend money unnecessarily, to demand that things get done very quickly and to expect your lawyers to be immersed in how the business operates. It’s difficult to tick all three of those boxes when you go externally.’