For this year’s GC Powerlist edition, we focused our research efforts around the theme of ‘resilience and recovery’. We chose this to reflect the transitional nature of the response to the Covid-19 crisis that has endured since our 2020 edition; while there is still certainly a hangover from the lockdown and its attendant business disruptions, the UK’s general counsel have been instrumental in stabilising the situation and returning to a growth phase. Many of the more fortunate companies, as you will see in the following pages, have even been able to capitalise on the situation.
The survey produced some interesting results. One of the most encouraging is that there is evidence that general counsel in the UK have increased their face-to-face time with the top brass of their organisations. Over half of respondents agreed that they have been more involved in c-suite matters in the period following the pandemic, with 39% strongly agreeing with this assessment. Only 7% disagreed, with none strongly disagreeing.
Looking back at the pandemic, the UK’s general counsel appear to have been putting their own people first and foremost. When discussing the greatest challenge of the past twelve months, the most common answer was safeguarding employee health and wellbeing. This points to a collaborative and compassionate corporate culture which prevails at many of the companies which feature in the 2021 UK GC Powerlist, which is something to be celebrated. Further insight into the difficulties faced by our in-house counsel can be gleaned from the fact that increased workload was the second-most common response. ‘We were required to manage the additional Covid-related workload on top of business as usual, most of which did not slow down’, reported one individual.
What about the verdict on home working going forward? Apparently, a resounding ‘yes’! All of the GCs who responded to our survey said at least some team members would be continuing with some form of flexi-working going forward. A little over half even said they would be expecting all of their team members to be partially or fully home-working from now on.
I’d like to say a heartfelt thank you to everyone – successful or unsuccessful in making the final shortlist – who spoke to us for this new-look edition of the UK GC Powerlist, and to Elisha Juttla, Mark McAteer and everyone else in our research team who worked on producing this year’s edition. Stay tuned for more GC Powerlists all over the world soon as our publishing schedule returns to some sort of normality in the coming months.
Joe Boswell is head of research for GC Powerlist series.
To view the full profiles for our nominated individuals, please visit:
GC Powerlist United Kingdom 2021