Team size:  85 

What significant projects or deals has the legal team worked on in the past year?  Can you provide examples of successful outcomes or major accomplishments?  

Managing the largest transaction and dispute in the UK telecoms sector, whilst supporting a marquee social value initiative.  

The prospective £15bn merger of Vodafone and Three’s UK businesses is set to deliver £11bn to the UK.  Since June 2023, we have driven the case for CMA clearance, responding to multiple CMA requests providing tens of thousands of documents.  This major transaction has necessitated collaboration across the entire legal function as we continue to deliver for Vodafone, the telecoms sector and the UK economy.  Furthermore, the team negotiated and closed a significant 10-year network sharing agreement with VMO2 and a business critical site deal with Cellnex.   

One of our most impactful achievements was successfully defending the Phones4u litigation, which involved over 40 witnesses during an 11-week trial. In October 2023 the Court decided in that the Defendants had not breached competition law, representing the culmination of a decade’s work by the Vodafone Legal Team.  

Vodafone has an intimate connection with the challenges faced by British Society on a day-to-day basis.  Our everyone.connected initiative, has helped over 2 million people (over 1 million this year) out of digital exclusion and our goal is to reach 4 million, by the end of 2025. The Legal Team has completed bespoke contracts with charities to provide connectivity to people in need, ensuring that technology is recycled efficiently and distributed to organisations who can make the best use of it.  

Can you sum up the team culture or ethos in one sentence? Giving some information afterwards about how this is developed.  

Our vision is to innovate boldly, deliver value and build trust. 

Our ‘Privacy Front Door’, represents a bold innovation in the provision of in-house legal and risk management services. This bespoke platform was built internally, standardising and expediting the Business’ route to privacy advice and data capture. The platform has reduced individual requests to the Privacy team by over 95% while continuing to provide expert legal guidance to the Business.  

Consistent with Vodafone’s status as a ‘great place to work’, we ensure that each individual’s voice is heard. We created six key pillars: Culture and Engagement, Customers and Stakeholders, Diversity and Inclusion, Development and Progression, Leadership Effectiveness and Believe in Us.  These pillars are run by the function for the function, creating guidance, training and implementing strategies to achieve each pillar’s outcomes.   

We value connecting and learning together to create the best place to work.  We established monthly ‘FIKA’ sessions – a Swedish concept where teams have casual breaks over coffee and cake.  These sessions provide the opportunity to unite in person to engage on a variety of topics, for example, Allyship within Diversity and Inclusion.   

How does the team stay updated with changing regulations/sanctions, ensure compliance, and handle legal landscape or industry trends?  

We have developed an interactive simulation with our panel firm, TLT, using emerging chatbot technology to simulate a dawn raid event, leveraging one of Vodafone’s core principles ‘Creating the Future’. 

Users role play as an in-house lawyer (working remotely), navigating a raid from their phone. The simulation goes through a wide range of potential scenarios and adapts depending on users’ responses.   

The tool generates a bespoke individualised “report card” containing personalised feedback and can be amended to accommodate new law.