I joined the 3Kites team in 2018 after a career break to spend more time with family (before children flew the nest) and having decided it was time to do something a bit different with my career.  Having started my working life in the early nineties in the competition & anti-trust team at Freshfields I ‘switched sides’ to go in-house in 1996 in a quest for more breadth to my legal career.  I joined the in-house team at Cable & Wireless plc and spent almost ten years there working as an in-house lawyer at group companies in the UK and Australia on a broad multi-disciplinary basis.  In 2005 I left to join easyJet plc where I spent the next ten years on the executive board as General Counsel, Company Secretary and Director of Regulation.

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Since 2015 I have set up a small airline consultancy (the aviation bug’s hard to remove from the system) and I have also spent significant time advising the Board of a listed company on governance matters.

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Having juggled the responsibilities of optimising a legal function (marrying in house resource cohesively with external counsel resources) while contributing to executive team management duties and being the Chairman and CEO’s ‘trusted adviser’, I am very aware of the challenges facing today’s GCs and their teams.  I’m also aware that as technology develops increasingly rapidly, it’s easy for busy lawyers to overlook the potential efficiency and cost benefits it can bring to in-house teams.  

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It’s not just about investing in bespoke SaaS offerings for lawyers – often in-house teams don’t use basic tools already available to them within their corporate systems infrastructure that could meet their document, contract or knowledge management needs.  This principle applies as much to the shared use of tech solutions between in-house teams and their external counsel as it does to in-house teams alone.  How often does the ‘legal panel review’ process result in technology-related ‘value adds’ offered by law firms (or any value-adds for that matter) which neither in-house client nor law firm then follow through to adopt?  

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With the in-house legal function’s needs not usually top of the CIO’s ‘to do’ list, I feel there is much that can be achieved by marrying 3Kites’ expertise with the needs of GCs and their in-house teams.