Colt Group
Robin Saphra garnered plenty of attention last year after signing Baker & McKenzie as Colt Group’s principal adviser on a fixed annual contract worth £1m a year, cutting down his roster of external advisers from around 60 firms to just three. This has clearly reduced his legal spend, which currently stands at around €12m per year.
Virgin
Robert Blok looks after the legal aspects of Virgin investments across a whole range of industry sectors and oversees the relationship between Virgin’s diverse businesses and the external law firms to make sure they use the best practice in every country.
Telefónica UK
Ed Smith certainly paid his dues before becoming GC at Telefónica UK in 2010: he has been with the company for 11 years. During that time, he has seen his company demerge from BT, rebrand into O2 and finally be acquired by Telefónica in 2005. So when he says, ‘I started absolutely at the ground floor’, he is not being too modest.
Interoute
Having practised in-house for telecoms companies since 1995 Maurice Woolf has, according to one telecoms lawyer, ‘long been at the heart of the UK communications industry’.
Hutchison 3G UK
Steven Lerner sees his role as an innovator. ‘3 is not afraid of challenging the status quo or taking risks so we expect our external firms to think in a more creative and challenging way,’ he says.
Lebara Group
Paul van Straaten loves to be in the middle of the action. Whether it’s high-profile disputes before the European Court of Justice, major M&A transactions or projects in developing countries, Lebara Group is never just ‘ticking over’, he says.
Vodafone
One of the most high profile and respected GCs around today, Rosemary Martin joined Vodafone after more than a decade at news agency Reuters.
Cable & Wireless Worldwide
Described by one telecoms expert as having done ‘a great job as GC at Cable & Wireless Worldwide in challenging times’, Philip Davis’ main task at CWW right now is to bring down group legal spend, which currently stands at around £1.2m a year.
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Merlin Entertainments Group
In running Merlin Entertainments Group’s legal team single-handedly, Colin Armstrong supports the entire group on all legal matters while his company secretarial function provides strategic and operational advice. Merlin is now the second-largest visitor attraction operator after Disney. The company manages 60 sites across Europe and the US, including family favourites such as Alton Towers, Sea Life, Legoland, Madame Tussauds, The Dungeons, Heide Park in Germany and the London Eye.
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Tesco
Adrian Morris’ team is vast – 250 staff, including 200 lawyers – but a company the size of Tesco needs a strong roster of external law firms to support that in-house team.
Greggs
Jonathan Jowett’s most recent victory against the government-imposed ‘pasty-tax’, which raised Greggs’ share price by 9%, turned into a public remonstration generating over 500,000 petition signatures and protests in Whitehall.
Ladbrokes
When Jonathan Adelman joined Ladbrokes in 2008, there was no internal legal team and a high external spend. In just four years, he transformed the gaming company’s in-house offering. The previous legal panel that was saturated with around 100 firms now has less than a dozen, reducing the typical spend of £8m-10m down to £4m-6m. He is particularly proud of his in-house team of six that he built from scratch.
Westfield Shoppingtowns
Leon Shelley’s first move out of private practice in 2000 as a banker at UBS Warburg was not well timed: he left just as the tech bubble burst. He returned to private practice before joining Westfield Shoppingtowns in 2005 as its first UK general counsel.
John Lewis Partnership
Margaret Casely–Hayford wins praise from private practitioners for her evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, thinking. During her six years at the partnership, she introduced a more cost-efficient legal services model and effective governance and compliance framework for the business.
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Associated British Foods
Described as ‘disarmingly charming, astute and always gets the commercial and legal picture’, Paul Lister runs a tight team of 40 lawyers spread across 47 countries worldwide, involved in a wide range of activities from retail to manufacturing. Associated British Foods’ brands include Primark, Twinings, Ovaltine, British Sugar, AB Mauri, Tip Top and Mazola.
Whitbread
With 21 years’ experience at Whitbread, Simon Barratt has been directly involved in some game-changing deals at the multinational hotel and restaurant company. One of the biggest was probably the de-merger and sale of 3,000 pubs in 2001 in a transaction worth £1.6bn that returned £1.1bn to its shareholders. He also steered the company through the acquisition of Premier Lodge in 2004 for £500m.
Marks & Spencer Group
Robert Ivens qualified as a solicitor back in 1983. Two years later he joined Marks & Spencer Group and has been there ever since. The iconic retailer hit headlines in 2004 when Ivens helped fight off a £9.1bn bid to acquire it by multi-billionaire businessman Philip Green who owns some of the biggest retail brands on the high street.
Sainsbury’s
Nick Grant created the Sainsbury’s Legal Community in 2011, which involves multiple firms collaborating to provide advice. Thirteen firms carry out 99% of Sainsbury’s externally sourced legal work, including Linklaters, Addleshaw Goddard, SNR Denton and Bond Dickinson.
International Group of P&I Clubs
As executive officer of International Group of P&I Clubs since 2006, Andrew Bardot is secretary of a body that insures 90% of the world’s oceangoing fleet. One private practitioner describes him as ‘one of the top private practitioners looking at things from the other side of the fence. After 25 years in private practice, he provides a very good perspective’.
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Associated British Ports
Andrew Garner heads the legal division of Britain’s largest port operator. He was appointed in 2005, and successfully navigated Associated British Ports through a multibillion-pound takeover in 2006 by a consortium of private investors, which included Goldman Sachs and Prudential.
