Team size: 13 employed plus two consultants and a panel of freelance prepublication lawyers

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

A defining project was leading the legal strategy for a significant content licensing agreement with a major generative AI platform. As AI companies increasingly scrape publisher data, protecting our journalistic IP has become an existential priority. My role involved establishing the commercial parameters for the use of our archives, ensuring robust attribution, and safeguarding against copyright infringement. The outcome was a multi-year, multi-million-pound revenue stream that monetizes our historical journalism while firmly protecting our IP rights in the AI space.

I also lead on a significant project consolidating our printing operations from three sites to one, including subcontracting some printing work to third party operators and managing any related competition risks.

We had a further trial of a preliminary issue in the long running phone hacking litigation, which concluded favourably for the company.

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

We have fundamentally transformed how the legal function supports a fast-paced, 24/7 newsroom, shifting from a traditional advisory model to an integrated, tech-enabled editorial partner.

We also launched targeted upskilling for the newsroom. We developed an interactive “Media Law 101” training module covering defamation, privacy, and contempt of court, enabling senior editors to handle low-level risk autonomously.

On the commercial side, we created automated templates for freelance contributor agreements and standard ad-insertion orders. This transformation has freed my senior media lawyers to focus on high-risk, front-page investigations and strategic digital growth initiatives.

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?

In the publishing sector, our approach to AI is highly governed, given the sensitivity of our IP and the unverified nature of many open-source models. Within the legal team, we utilise closed-environment, enterprise-grade AI tools primarily for commercial efficiencies: summarising lengthy vendor contracts, identifying non-standard clauses in complex ad-tech agreements and streamlining due diligence during M&A. This has significantly reduced the administrative burden on my team.

We maintain a strict “human-in-the-loop” policy. AI may provide assistance with reviewing and drafting documents, but a qualified lawyer must always review the output. Crucially, we have strict data hygiene protocols to ensure no pre-publication journalism, confidential sources, or sensitive business data is ever fed into external AI models.

Looking ahead, I believe AI will transform in-house legal operations. Routine contract drafting and basic regulatory tracking will be automated. However, the premium on human judgment, particularly in media law, where interpreting the nuance of a defamatory inference or the ethics of a privacy intrusion requires deep emotional and cultural intelligence, will only increase.