About

Team size: 500 overall with around 40 lawyers

What are the most important transactions, litigations or other major projects that you have been involved in during the last year?

The last 18 months have been dominated by the impact of the global pandemic. Our civil aerospace business was particularly badly hit, as restrictions around the world limited air travel. For us it was all about reacting to that in a way that best protected and supported our people, our customers, our investors and other stakeholders. All of that kept me and the team, and the rest of the organisation, incredibly busy at a time when we all had our own individual challenges outside of work.

What were the main difficulties your company faced during the initial Covid lockdown?

We faced similar challenges to all other organisations. As chair of our crisis management team, I saw first-hand the amazing work the teams did to manage through the initial period leading into the lockdown. We had to react fast to the developing situation; keeping our people safe, keeping our operations going; supporting our customers; communicating clearly and often as more and more people found themselves in a new working environment. We had to remember that our facilities around the world were having to deal with different rules, different infection waves, and different cultures.

As we saw the magnitude of the impact on our business, we quickly moved into the work of ensuring we had the right levels of liquidity to survive. We had to make some very difficult decisions around restructuring and cost savings and we – entirely virtually – executed a rights issue.

We’ve made so much progress, and our people can be really proud of what they’ve achieved on behalf of the company. There’s loads more to do to sustainably keep ourselves in good shape and to refocus on the long term strategy (which has been good to do).

Did the Brexit deal reached at the end of 2020 give you and your business greater clarity for the future?

For us, the biggest challenge around Brexit was the uncertainty. Companies thrive in predictable environments and, for a while, the potential outcomes from the Brexit decision were anything but predictable. By the deal gave us the clarity needed and we were able to finalise our plan to manage the various impacts on our organisation. It helped that we’d done a lot of work to identify the areas where we might be impacted and contingency planning for them. Personally, it was really interesting to sponsor the cross-business/cross-functional working team.

Are there any other of your achievements over the past 18 months that you’d like to mention?

Re-learning long division during lockdown was not an insignificant achievement. My wife and I got through home schooling without either (i) getting divorced; or (ii) throttling a child, was a low, but critical, barometer of success. Hashtag winning.