About

‘I am passionate about the role of in-house counsel – what the role is, and the value and contribution I believe the role can add’, says Clifford Tuck. ‘I also see the effective interaction between the in-house role and external advisors as being of paramount importance – not just a revenue and cost relationship. Together, the in-house and external advisor can, and invariably will, facilitate better outcomes for clients’. During a decade of in-house experience, Tuck has made it a focus to position himself and the teams he leads as ‘business partners’, and to build the legal brand internally. He has particularly impressed sources with relationship-building skills and the trust he has won from internal clients. ‘The biggest challenge I have faced is what I call “lost in translation”’, Tuck says. ‘In my experience, it is a truism that the business will have difficulty understanding the language that we as lawyers speak. Similarly, the business will have difficulty understanding the way that we as lawyers tend to look at things. This, again in my experience, is the challenge to achieving the “business partnering” status’. When he joined Drillsearch Energy as GC in 2014, he was its first in-house lawyer. ‘Necessarily, therefore, an important part of my role initially was to define the legal in-house function and associated expectations’, Tuck explains. As the architect for the function’s beginnings, he has promoted a strong integration with the business from the outset. He has also made it a focus to drive forward a compliance mind-set across the wider organisation. ‘In other words, being clear this department is not a compliance department, rather, it is a functional support area to help business maintain a compliance culture’, Tuck says. ‘This is something I am quite passionate about’.