About

Team size: 14

Major legal advisers: Baker McKenzie, White & Case, Freshfields, Deloitte, Gide Loyrette Nouel, Jeantet

What are the most important transactions and litigations that you have been involved in during the last year?

2019 saw a successful IPO for Trainline – the second largest in Europe – where I led a team to complete the legal and governance workstreams. Immediately following the IPO an intensive programme of work followed to embed best practice governance including Market Abuse Regulation training across the organisation, share scheme roll out and enhancing Board and Committee practice. The legal team has also been successful in the last year setting up various competition law reviews taken by various EU regulators against abusive practices of various suppliers.

In early January 2021, Trainline announced the pricing and final terms of the offering of £150m of senior unsecured convertible bonds due 2026. The net proceeds of the issue of the bonds will provide additional liquidity, protecting the business further in an extended Covid-19 downturn scenario while giving greater flexibility to invest in possible future growth opportunities. I led on the issuing of the bond together with members of the legal team.

We were five times oversubscribed (close to £750m of demand). This demand also allowed us to push investors to the favourable end of the range for Trainline and we were able to achieve a 50% conversion premium (we presented a 45%-50% range) and a 1% coupon (we presented a 1% to 1.5%).

How have you maintained your team’s cohesion when you have been unable to see them face-to-face as regularly as usual?

Not that I would wish us to go back through this but as a legal team we are coming out of this even stronger than we went in. We’ve spent so much time communicating and sharing that we feel closer as a team and have had more time discussing how we work together and individually most effectively. We met more regularly and used Slack far more for ad hoc conversations. More team meetings and one to ones, together with social events like online charades and home delivery of drinks and nibbles. Overcommunicating is the key. If we can get through Covid-19 as a team, we can get through anything.

I believe I’ve also grown as a manager – you really have to understand the full person that you manage, not just the professional person you see at work but also the ups and downs of their personal lives.

The lines between work life and home life have blurred. We all want people to feel that they’re productive but there are things in our personal lives that can impact that – whether that’s having kids climbing over you or deliveries arriving and disrupting your meetings, or all of the challenges that we’ve had of being at home. It’s important for managers to address this and remain open and understanding to it.

Has WFH inspired any innovation in terms of the way you or your team work? Are there any standout products you now use that you did not before?

We’re a lean, agile team, reflecting the organisation we work in. We’ve always worked at full tilt and been early adopters of legal tech. Our working structure and tech really came into its own in lockdown.

We were lucky that as a tech company, working remotely was eminently possible practically – I think the hardest part was the mental adjustment and managing wellbeing throughout. Once you get through the practical set up then it’s really learning new skills of engaging a team entirely virtually and ensuring collaboration remains the same as if you were in person.

We started using Jira a lot more. When remote working first began, it was difficult to know as a team where we spent too much or too little of our time, and where the spikes were coming from. For me, it was my remote management tool to really understand workflow and capacity of the legal team. I found it really useful because I could see where these spikes in work were coming from, and I could share that with other people in the business as a real visual representation of the work we were accomplishing with our 13-strong team.

Of course, Docusign is the piece of tech I could not live without now, and Concord provide our document repository online which again allows perfect remote working capabilities.

Even in the best-case scenario, Covid-19 is likely to have far-reaching ramifications. How are you safeguarding the long-term health of the business?

I was really impressed with how the executive team pulled together to manage all aspects of the lockdown – in particular, the regular communications with staff and the focus on wellbeing. As part of the team, you have to remain really optimistic but also support each other personally. You need to break out of just being a GC and really lean into any area that needs support, whether that involves legal expertise or not. This is the most important area to continue to safeguard the health of the company, looking after the wellbeing of our people.

Our main priorities throughout Covid-19 were supporting a lot of frontline staff in our contact centres and comms team who were dealing with huge travel refund requests and ever changing travel restrictions and travel issues. We continue to assess and monitor government roadmap on recovery and bring this back into the business for planning purposes.

Ticket sales were severely reduced so there was more focus on using the time to continue developing great products to help with the return of rail when it happens. For example, looking at flexible season tickets and passing on government communications became important workstreams. We’re expanding rapidly in EU countries and there should have been more activity in that expansion – and we can see that rail travel should bounce back and digital is becoming a really popular channel now for buying rail tickets – it was even evident from the easing of the first lockdown. I have been part of the effort lobbying government to ensure that rail travel is encouraged to avoid a car-led recovery which would be adverse to the environment.

The convertible bonds issue will provide additional liquidity, protecting the business further in an extended Covid-19 downturn scenario while giving greater flexibility to invest in possible future growth opportunities.