<strong>Legal team: </strong> Two; full directorate: 40 

<strong>What are the key projects you have been involved in over the past twelve months? </strong> 

The bid to host the UEFA Women’s Champions League Final 2029: there is a huge amount of work that goes in to submitting a bid to host a major event.  Having led on the successful joint bid to host UEFA Euro 2028 with England, Scotland and Ireland, I naturally led on the bid for Cardiff to host the UEFA Women’s Champions League Final in 2029 that we recently submitted to UEFA. The legal work is intense with the negotiation of four major agreements in the form of a staging agreement, host city agreement, stadium agreement and airport agreement. As the host nation, the FAW is a party to all these agreements, and we have the direct line of negotiation with UEFA. With that comes the challenge of negotiating with the relevant stakeholder at the same time (e.g. Cardiff City Council for the host city agreement). A project such as this requires you to go beyond legal though. You have to adopt a pragmatic approach in recognising and balancing risk against the potential loss of opportunity. In doing so, we were able to put a compelling bid together. 

The Cymru Premier League relaunch was another key project. This has involved the negotiation of terms for a new OTT streaming platform, significant changes to the league’s rules, the negotiation of a variety of complex sponsorship agreements and regulation changes.  We adopted a hybrid approach of dealing with the majority of this in-house and working closely with specialist counsel on other matters.  

Governance change is fundamentally important for all sporting organisations. Over the past twelve months we’ve introduced various governance changes to ensure the orgnaisation is modernising. Critical to this was amending the orgaanisation’s constitutional documents and obtaining the necessary approvals which I was central to. 

<strong>Please provide a brief description of any internal transformation/development projects within your legal team over the last twelve months (AI usage, new legal panels, expansion/restructuring of legal team, DE&I initiatives etc.).  </strong> 

We undertook a complete review of our GDPR compliance. I identified this as a critical project on the basis it hadn’t been done previously and due to the amount of data we hold. This review produced a remediation plan which has seen major changes to the way in which we approach compliance. The project has also put us in a position to progress with our artificial intelligence (AI) use by providing a compliance framework that can be built upon to include safeguards surrounding AI. 

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

By keeping the ethos of doing the right thing at the centre of decision-making, as well as encouraging challenge from my team. This requires courage in circumstances where there’s pressure from other areas to make a different decision. But by sticking to this value, we are upholding good governance, which is essential when there is external scrutiny over your decisions. 

<strong>What are the most important attributes of the modern GC and what advice would you give to those aspiring to be an in-house lawyer? </strong> 

Adaptability, efficiency and approachability. Organisations want advice in an easily digestible manner which will help them achieve their strategic objectives. Being approachable facilitates you always being in the room and knowing what all areas of the organisation are doing. Anyone aspiring to work in-house should get to know the organisation they want to work at. It’s about being more than a lawyer. You need to be a facilitator. 

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

Missed opportunities are a huge part of risk management. Balancing these against legal risk is all about knowing your redlines and using experience to understand when the legal risks outweigh a commercial opportunity. Having a concise and slick due diligence process is essential to informing a decision about whether to progress with a certain commercial development or advising to withdraw.