About

Team size: 250
Major law firms used: Allen & Overy, Eversheds Sutherland, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer

The experienced and influential group general counsel of defence multinational BAE Systems, Philip Bramwell, has one key goal in the operation of his 250-strong in-house legal team: making the wider business of more than 80,000 employees more ‘legally astute’. He consistently cites the work of US academic Constance Bagley, ‘Winning Legally: The Value of Legal Astuteness’, whose theory is that in-house demands will always be proportionate to the scale of a business, unless that business
has a better knowledge of its law and regulations.

‘Our philosophy is to staff to mean forecast demand, workload and specialisms,’ Bramwell says. ‘When I arrived at BAE [in 2007], we had no employment team; now we have five full-time employment lawyers. We’ve added six IT lawyers where five years ago there were none.’

As the burden of regulation has increased and the social expectations of business has grown, in-house legal departments have necessarily bulked up, he says. This is particularly the case in the defence industry, with Bramwell saying he has never had a business leader ask him to decrease expenditure on regulatory compliance. ‘Those regulations are there for a reason and they’re onerous for a reason. Our commitment to abide by them meticulously is total.’

But the in-house legal department remains a cost function within BAE, which means it has to justify its existence and demonstrate where it is adding value. Bramwell says lawyers are not inherently good salespeople, which means the function needs to learn to ‘manage its publicity’. If you do not tell the business what you have done, the business will likely conclude you have not done anything. This is where the ‘legally astute’ business comes in. Bramwell’s lawyers provide monthly value-add reports that detail what they have done over and above the day job. Developing smarter training is a key focus.

‘We’ve had some great success with online training. We’re not rivalling Netflix in terms of customer take-up and pleasure, but we are working hard to make our online training tools as good as possible.’