About

Team size: 65
Major law firms used: Addleshaw Goddard, Allen & Overy, Herbert Smith Freehills, Macfarlanes

‘We should have a lean team,’ comments Associated British Foods (ABF) director of legal services and company secretary Paul Lister in response to having just 65 lawyers in an organisation of more than 137,000 employees across 50 countries. ‘A lean team gives people the ability to be excited by the work they’re doing each day; the more you dilute it, the more mundane some of the work would be. I’m not sure I’d want to recruit a lawyer who wanted to do mundane work.’

No surprise then that Lister has been on a drive to bring more work in-house. ABF has no formal panel and each year tries to ‘get rid of the tail’ of external providers. ‘For example, I could look at if we are outsourcing too much general commercial work in the UK. You do an equation: for X-thousand pounds of outside work I might as well just get another lawyer and then I can have the benefit of someone learning the business. I can get value for it and it pays for itself.

‘We should be better at that than outside counsel and, not only that, we know what our business needs and risk appetite are. If we don’t, then we should all be fired.’

ABF’s team is split 50:50 between the UK and the rest of the world, with 60% of the team commercial lawyers covering distribution agreements and terms and licensing, with the remaining specialists covering areas such as M&A and antitrust.

ABF, a £15bn-plus food, ingredients and retail multinational, which owns household names such as Primark and Twinings, buys and sells a lot of companies. It had an expansive 2016/17, with multiple nine-figure transactions, and built on this momentum with several smaller deals over 2018.

Lister’s attention has also turned to technology and how the function might gain efficiency. He has looked at high-profile artificial intelligence provider Kira but also wants to find a tool to measure the team’s internal efficiency and time spent on pieces of work. Deloitte has been brought in to assess how the function is using technology before any decisions are made. ‘Sometimes you wish law firms would open up a bit more. There’s a debate to be had around how they charge for technology, because if Kira can analyse a document in seconds, which used to be hours, who’s going to get the benefit of that? I’d like the benefit of that.’

Addleshaw Goddard partner Chris Taylor comments: ‘Paul is great to work with – he is constantly challenging perceived wisdom, which really keeps you on your toes, forcing you to come up with new, better ideas and ways of working. His entire focus is on driving the very best commercial and ethical outcomes for ABF.’