About

Alan Daly, group head of legal, leads a team of 38 solicitors, 12 legal executives and eight legal secretaries at ESB (The Electricity Supply Board) providing advice and transactional support to all core areas of the company’s businesses. Supporting ESB’s workforce of more than 7,000 employees, the team is the first point of call for all legal issues arising in ESB’s domestic and international operations in the generation, supply and transmission of electricity and in its energy consulting business. The team’s staff provide legal assistance and support on a wide range of issues, focusing in particular on the following six core areas of legal practice: corporate and commercial law, regulatory and competition law, employment and industrial relations law, litigation and dispute resolution, commercial property, planning and environmental law. The strength of the ESB in-house legal team lies in the diversity of training and experience of its staff. ESB’s solicitors come from varied backgrounds; some having trained in the ESB legal department itself and some having trained and worked in private practice, including in top tier commercial law-firms and multinationals. Collectively, its specialist legal advisers in each of the above areas of practice have decades of experience in the energy sector in Ireland, providing them with a unique ability to provide legal advisory services that one would normally only expect to find in a medium to large private practice law-firm. The ESB group head of legal has overall functional responsibility for the in-house legal team, assisted by four experienced senior legal managers, each of whom specialises in a specific area of legal practice. As noted above, ESB’s in-house team provides advice and assistance in a focused range of practice areas. Its corporate and commercial lawyers advise on a range of projects recent examples of which include the acquisition of a 12.5% shareholding in the Galloper Offshore Wind Farm. They also assist on ESB and UK Green Investment Bank (GIB) joint investment in a new £190m renewable power facility at the Port of Tilbury as well as joint venture SIRO with Vodafone, which will see both established operators investing €450 million in building Ireland’s first 100% fibre-to-the-building broadband network. SIRO is unique in that it exclusively offers a wholesale open access network meaning that it will be available to all telecoms operators in Ireland to resell to their customers. In addition to providing advice on the aforementioned transactions, the expertise and experience of the team means that ESB is for the most part self-sufficient in relation to the other core practice areas. Daly identifies legal manager for networks and litigation Annelie Walsh as critical to the team, highlighting her ‘strategic advice to ESB’s Networks division management team’. He also highlights John McDermott, Sarah Phelan and Emma Keavney as making up the remainder of the legal management team with each being an expert in his or her respective fields of practice and leading a team of specialist legal practitioners in that field.