Team size: ~150 globally (~50 at Group)

What are the key projects you have been involved in over the past twelve months?

Over the past twelve months, Joanne has been at the centre of Howden’s evolution from a fast-growing international insurance group into a scaled, global business. As group chief legal officer and group general counsel, she advises the Board and Executive on the company’s most strategically significant matters, including M&A, capital strategy, governance, litigation, international expansion, IPO readiness and enterprise-wide transformation. Her remit is exceptional in both scale and complexity: the legal and company secretariat division supports a business valued at more than £10bn, operating across 56 countries, with more than 500 legal entities and a global legal and governance community of over 150 people.

Joanne’s contribution is not simply that of an experienced lawyer managing legal risk – she has become a strategic architect of Howden’s growth, building the legal infrastructure, governance discipline and operating model required for a business of Howden’s scale and ambition. In the past year alone, she has overseen legal support for more than 65 M&A transactions across 14 jurisdictions, ensuring that Howden can continue to grow at pace while maintaining consistency, commercial discipline and appropriate risk control. She has also advised on major financing activity, including $1.8bn of debt raised and $4.3bn of debt repriced in 2025, helping to ensure that the Group’s capital structure supports its long-term growth trajectory.

A defining feature of Joanne’s leadership has been her role in enabling Howden’s entry into the US retail broking market — one of the most significant strategic developments in the company’s recent history. She was the legal lead on the launch and rapid expansion of the US retail business, which scaled to over 1,000 employees within twelve months. This required not only transactional and regulatory support, but also decisive leadership through high-stakes litigation and competitor challenges. Joanne coordinated external counsel across multiple US disputes, ensuring court compliance, continuity of business operations and effective management of litigation risk, while enabling the business to maintain momentum in a strategically critical market.

Joanne has also been instrumental in bringing governance, controls and guardrails to the business. She is driving the evolution of governance frameworks across the Group, embedding transparency, accountability and discipline across more than 500 legal entities and thousands of directorships. This includes strengthening board and committee structures, improving corporate governance processes and helping the business mature from an entrepreneurial, acquisition-led model into a global organisation with the controls, data and governance expected of a future listed business.

The impact of Joanne’s work is clear: Howden has continued to expand internationally, execute complex transactions, raise and refinance significant capital, manage major disputes within acceptable risk parameters and build the governance foundations required for its next stage of growth. Joanne’s leadership has enabled Legal to be seen not as a control function, but as a trusted business partner and one that enables delivery, powers growth and helps Howden move with speed without compromising integrity or judgement.

Please provide a brief description of any internal transformation/development projects within your legal team over the last twelve months.

Joanne has led significant transformation of Howden’s global legal and company secretariat division, repositioning it from a decentralised support function into a more connected, data-driven and strategically aligned global community. Her vision for Legal is ambitious and business-focused: to be an adaptive, pragmatic and trusted partner, empowering people to shape solutions, manage legal risk proactively and help build a great global business of which colleagues, clients and partners are proud.

A core part of this transformation has been the development of a new global target operating model for the Legal division. Joanne has led a programme to improve accountability, clarify roles and reporting lines, reduce duplication, strengthen centres of excellence and ensure the division can scale sustainably as Howden grows exponentially across markets, products and regulatory environments. Joanne has recognised that legal cost and headcount cannot simply grow in line with the business. Instead, she is building a team that uses the right mix of people, process, technology and external partners to deliver better outcomes at scale.

One of the most significant achievements has been the creation of Howden’s first global Legal Panel. Under Joanne’s sponsorship, Legal has moved from a fragmented model involving over 500 external law firms to a structured panel designed to deliver control, transparency, value and stronger strategic partnerships. The panel introduces clearer standards for law firm selection, performance management, pricing and value creation, ensuring that the right work is delivered by the right firms at the right price from the right place. It also creates opportunities for reciprocity, innovation, secondee support and alternative delivery models, turning external counsel management into a source of strategic value rather than a pure cost-control exercise.

Joanne has also championed the use of alternative legal service providers and right-sourcing models to relieve capacity pressure and ensure that high-volume, repeatable work is handled efficiently. This supports a broader cultural shift within the division: lawyers are encouraged to focus their time on judgment-led, high-value work, while lower-risk, less complex activity is standardised, automated, outsourced or delivered through more cost-effective channels.

Technology has been another defining feature of Joanne’s transformation agenda. She has supported the rollout of legal-tailored technology, including Contract Lifecycle Management, legal spend management, data dashboards and AI. Most notably, she has championed the adoption of Harvey AI as a purpose-built legal AI platform. Joanne’s approach to AI has been balanced and responsible: she sees it as a force multiplier for legal judgement, not a replacement for it, and has insisted on governance, quality control and clear human oversight.

Alongside process and technology, Joanne has invested heavily in culture and talent. She has created leadership forums, strengthened communication across regions, supported career development frameworks and encouraged curiosity so that the global legal community embraced new capabilities in data, AI and strategic business partnering. Her transformation agenda is not only operational but cultural: she has led her team to move from being reactive advisers to proactive strategic partners, moving away from traditional legal delivery to a technology-enabled practice that owns the best delivery model.

The role of the GC has evolved significantly into that of a strategic business partner. How do you balance commercial objectives with legal risk?

Joanne’s approach to legal risk is pragmatic, commercial and deeply aligned to Howden’s entrepreneurial culture. She understands that in a business built on growth, client relationships and market opportunity, Legal cannot be perceived as the function that says “no”. Instead, she has built a culture that helps the business understand risk, make informed decisions and move forward with confidence.

Her philosophy is that good legal advice should enable better commercial judgement. She positions Legal as a strategic partner that identifies routes through complexity, rather than identifying obstacles. This means engaging early with the business, understanding the commercial objective, calibrating risk against business appetite and then designing safeguards that allow progress without exposing the Group to unacceptable levels of risk.

The launch of Howden’s US retail business is a powerful example of this approach in practice. The opportunity was strategically critical, but it came with intense legal, regulatory and litigation risk. Joanne’s leadership enabled the business to continue growing at pace while defending competitor claims, managing court processes and coordinating specialist external counsel. Her stewardship helped Howden maintain business continuity, protect its people and clients and build a major new platform in one of the world’s most important insurance markets.

Joanne applies the same mindset to M&A, governance, financing and transformation. She recognises that legal risk is not binary; it must be understood in context. Her skill lies in helping the Board and Executive distinguish between risks that can be accepted, risks that must be mitigated and risks that should change the course of action. That judgement – calm, commercial and trusted – is one of the reasons Legal has become so central to Howden’s strategic decision-making.

How do you use AI within your legal team to improve efficiency while maintaining quality, governance and integrity? How do you think AI will impact in-house legal functions more widely?

Joanne sees AI as one of the most important opportunities for in-house legal teams to embrace to transform the way they work. Her focus is not on novelty, but on practical, measurable impact: reducing manual effort, improving consistency, accelerating delivery and freeing lawyers to spend more time on the work that requires judgement, experience and strategic insight.

Under Joanne’s leadership, Howden Legal has piloted and rolled out Harvey AI and a CLM platform. During a three-month pilot phase, Joanne’s legal team demonstrated that legal-specific AI can deliver tangible value across drafting, document review, research, due diligence, litigation support, RFP evaluation and knowledge management. A hackathon took place in London where eight teams optimised Harvey agents to build AI-enabled solutions to routine and repetitive time-consuming tasks that each team faced. This motivated the team to be curious and engage with the technology and helped build the business case for the licenses going forward.

Joanne has also supported development of AI-enabled workflows for high-volume M&A, external counsel selection and structured document review. These use cases are designed to embed Howden’s playbooks, risk appetite and preferred ways of working into repeatable processes, improving both efficiency and quality.

Importantly, Joanne’s approach to AI is grounded in governance and integrity. She is clear that AI should augment legal judgement, not replace it. Outputs must be reviewed, sensitive data must be protected and the tool must be used within appropriate professional and ethical boundaries. This balanced approach is ambitious but controlled and is exactly what modern legal leadership requires. Joanne is not simply adopting AI; she is shaping how a global legal function can use it responsibly, practically and at scale.

How do you help drive strong governance and ethical decision-making across your organisation?

Joanne has made governance a central pillar of Howden’s growth strategy. In a business that has expanded rapidly through acquisition, entered new markets and built an increasingly complex global footprint, Joanne believes that strong governance is not optional, it is essential to sustainable growth and investor confidence, particularly given Howden’s aspirations to IPO at the right time.

Her work has focused on embedding governance into the way the business operates, rather than treating it as a separate compliance exercise. She has driven the development of clearer decision-making frameworks, board and committee structures, role profiles, delegation processes and corporate governance standards across the Group. This is particularly important given the scale of Howden’s corporate structure, with its many legal entities and a constantly evolving global perimeter.

Joanne’s leadership has also strengthened accountability. By improving visibility of legal entities, directorships, governance processes and risk ownership, she is helping the business make better decisions and manage obligations consistently across jurisdictions. This work supports not only compliance, but also strategic agility: a business with clear governance can move faster because people understand who decides, what standards apply and where accountability sits.

Ethical decision-making is embedded in Joanne’s leadership style. She fosters a culture in which openness, challenge and professional judgement are valued. She encourages her team to be commercially minded, but never casual about integrity. Whether advising on disputes, transactions, market entry, regulatory obligations or AI adoption, Joanne insists on clear thinking, transparent escalation and decisions that stand up to scrutiny.

The function is trusted because it is commercial and respected because it is principled. Joanne has built a legal and governance function that supports growth while protecting the standards, reputation and long-term resilience of the business.