What are the most significant cases and/or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

The legal team has played a central role in helping to drive Be.EV’s growth. This has included supporting the business to secure one of the first large-scale senior bank debt facilities in the UK EV charging sector, raising further major investment from our main equity investor, and leading on a transformative acquisition of a competitor. Each of these key milestones will enable the business to continue to scale at pace.

As a member of the executive leadership team, I have also been able to provide broader strategic and cross-functional leadership. By having a seat at this table, I have been involved in and helped steer key decisions at an early stage.

Transformative Bank Debt

I led on the legal work to secure a £55m senior facility agreement with NatWest and KfW IPEX-Bank, alongside helping to secure continued equity support from a fund managed by Octopus Energy Generation. This work involved extensive discussions with senior lenders to align funder requirements with the operational realities of a rapidly growing charge point operator and restructuring existing senior debt as a mezzanine tranche to underpin this. The transaction was critical to our growth ambitions by providing the long-term capital certainty required to deliver our target of more than 1,000 ultra-rapid charge points by the end of 2026. The deal marked a major milestone in the industry and is regularly referred to as a benchmark / market precedent in subsequent financings.

Leading Major Acquisition of a Competitor

I also managed the acquisition of a significant competitor, with a geographically complementary portfolio of 1,200 electric vehicle charge points across 300 sites. Due diligence was primarily undertaken by the internal legal team, supported by external advisers who provided specialist advice, and supplemented by our targeted use of AI tools to accelerate the review and control costs.

The deal involved the carveout of the target from an existing business, pre- and post-sale reorganisation, as well as extensive transition planning to ensure the rapid operational integration and to mitigate against revenue risk and poor customer experience that could otherwise result from combining two networks. The acquisition triples the size of our existing network, adding significant scale, to an already rapidly growing business, and leaving us well placed to make further strategic acquisitions as the market continues to consolidate over the next few years.

What do you see as an opportunity or risk over the next six months?

The electric vehicle charging sector is highly capital-intensive, and, as the UK is still in the relatively early stage of the transition away from internal combustion engine vehicles, is sensitive to policy and regulatory signals. The zero-emission vehicle mandate has historically played an important role in underpinning equity investor and lender confidence, by providing a clear pathway to mass adoption of electric vehicles.

Any material change to these targets could therefore represent a near-term risk for the sector, potentially affecting the availability and cost of both debt and equity funding and constraining the pace at which infrastructure can be deployed. From a legal and commercial perspective, my focus is on ensuring that funding structures, contractual arrangements and growth plans retain sufficient flexibility to absorb policy volatility, while continuing to support long-term deployment objectives.

The sector is also currently a very crowded space, with over one hundred and fifty operators rolling out infrastructure.

Whilst there are a number of challenges in the short to medium term, I strongly believe that they are ultimately outweighed by the huge opportunity for a business in our sector with the right ambition and growth strategy. As for BE.EV, we see the market entering a consolidation-phase of the growth cycle, and we are well placed to capitalise on this because of our strong backing, maintenance of strict operational and financial discipline, and our laser focus on customer experience.

Could you share an example of a time when you came up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works and did not come at a large expense?

I joined Be.EV in early 2022 as employee number five, which gave me the opportunity to design the legal, risk and commercial functions from the ground up to ensure that they best enable scalable growth whilst providing the right checks and balances.

Taking the legal function as an example, this plays a critical role in every stage of our site development – from early diligence, through to planning, grid arrangements, land rights, and ultimately to the construction and energisation of our sites. With complex interdependencies, and a large volume of sites being developed quickly, creating clear, systematic, and agile processes were essential to enable this.

I played a key role in delivering this by working closely with our functional leads and our delivery partners to map out and optimise the full site development lifecycle. Through this work, we created an operating model with a clear governance framework, which balanced speed of execution, commercial considerations, regulatory compliance and importantly stakeholder experience.

This approach has driven operational excellence and discipline, has reduced sunk capital, shortened development timelines, and enabled the business to scale without adding proportionate overhead. Importantly, it has also reduced reliance on the legal function for day-to-day execution, allowing legal input to be embedded in the business while freeing my time to focus on strategic matters, such as funding, acquisitions, and long-term strategic risk planning.

We have subsequently integrated targeted AI tools and automation to help to optimise our processes further and enable continued efficiency. Together, we have driven innovation beyond the traditional fiefdoms of a legal function and added true value (including in monetary terms) to the business.

General counsel often speak of the need to be strategic to reach the pinnacle of the profession. What does being strategic mean to you?

For me, being strategic as a general counsel means understanding where the business is trying to go and shaping the legal, governance and risk framework so that ambition can be pursued with confidence rather than constraint.

It requires moving beyond reactive advice and focusing on anticipation: identifying issues that are not yet problems but will become limiting factors as the business scales, whether that is capital structure, regulatory exposure, contractual architecture, or organisational design.

In a growth-stage business, strategy is also about prioritisation. Not every risk warrants the same level of attention, and part of my role is to help the board and executive team distinguish between theoretical and material risk, deploying legal effort where it will have the greatest impact on long-term value creation.

Ultimately, being strategic means building structures and habits that reduce dependency on the GC personally, enabling legal to operate as an enabler of growth while freeing capacity to focus on the decisions that will shape the business over the long term.

Have you had any experiences during your career as a lawyer that stand out as particularly unique or interesting?

Earlier in my career, I was seconded for eighteen months to a joint venture as the business’ legal and commercial director.

The joint venture was established to bid for, and subsequently deliver, an extremely high-profile and high value first-generation outsourcing of a critical government service for the Ministry of Justice. Due to the sensitivity of the service, any delivery failure would have attracted significant public and political scrutiny, creating reputational and commercial risk for both shareholders.

My role involved supporting the bid submission, structuring and establishing the joint venture, acquiring two businesses from the Ministry of Justice and supporting a major +£30m transformation programme involving approximately 1,500 employees, complex IT integration, third-sector delivery partners and a geographically dispersed estate.

I also played a key role supporting operational delivery and managing the commercial interfaces with the client, whilst balancing the competing interests of two shareholders. As a senior legal counsel at the time, this represented a significant step up in responsibility, including leading a team of experienced commercial managers, reporting directly to the CEO and working closely with the board and shareholders to ensure alignment and drive success. The experience fundamentally shaped my approach as a commercially focused, board-level GC. When I look back at my time, it really showed me the importance of understanding stakeholder dynamics and building strong relationships really does enable you to deliver the business’ objectives more effectively and equally helps to navigate difficult/challenging situations better.