About

How did you adapt to the initial shock of the Covid-19 lockdown?

The standout thing for me was how our individual staff members responded to it. You can build as many plans, processes and procedures for these events as you like, but if the staff don’t participate wholeheartedly, anything on paper is pretty useless. We found our staff were extremely engaged with making the new operating model work, and were very keen to make the new technology work as well. For instance, we had a new piece of technology that allowed brokers to work from home up and running within about two weeks of the lockdown order. Everyone worked together perfectly, showing enormous amounts of resilience in the process, which was the most impressive thing about our response from my perspective.

It’s been so successful that it’s changed our disaster planning, and probably that of other financial services firms too. Previously, many companies in the city have paid for large warehouses outside of central London that have been earmarked to maintain the operation of financial markets in the event of an outage or similar disaster. Now, following Covid-19, the contingency plan for many firms could simply be for everyone to work from home. Everything is just as secure and can be monitored remotely. Whether regulators will accept remote working as the new fallback for disaster and contingency planning will be interesting.

How have you seen the role of the in-house lawyer change during the course of your career, and where is it going next?

The days of the GC who is restricted to advising the board or management on a law or regulation applicable to a particular business or sector are long gone.

The current GC model – and the one I encourage my team to aspire to – is to be much more of a risk adviser to management and I think that’s the future. By that, I mean leveraging your legal risk training and experience in order to figure out what really matters to management and then help them navigate and find solutions.

Lawyers are very good at absorbing a lot of information quickly and figuring out what to focus on, and while I think you can successfully use those skills in a multitude of scenarios, I think they are most usefully deployed as part of a ‘risk partner’ role. The most successful in-house lawyers in my team are not contacted by business leaders on purely legal issues, but around commercial ones.

That’s where the future lies for in-house lawyers. It’s about harnessing what our legal training gives us; in my opinion, we think in a unique way compared to our colleagues.

What are the main ways that regulation of financial services is likely to change in the future?

What we are seeing now is that, globally, regulators have realised that, while enforcement is a useful tool and can be applied successfully in the event of rule breaches, there is nothing quite like pushing the responsibility for ensuring compliance back on the managers within the firms they regulate.

The most obvious example of this is probably The Senior Managers and Certification Regime (SM&CR) in the UK where firms are required to manage their staff in accordance with relatively proscriptive guidelines and managers are accountable for failings. The FCA’s number of reported enforcement cases has reduced recently – though they of course continue to handle the significant cases – and, while some of this could be Covid-19-related, in my view the reason for this is tactical as the regulator seeks to place the onus for action and accountability on the management of firms.