What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

As a sole GC in a rapidly scaling business time is not always on my side, so juggling a £78m acquisition of a competing business in just 6 weeks was significant, to say the least!

Ably assisted by external counsel it still needed hands-on in-house expertise in the due diligence process, SPA drafting to ensure we fully understood what we were buying and how it would fit into our business and what risks we would face after completion. The subsequent integration work looking at supplier synergy, customer contracting and even harmonising policies across both organisations has been stimulating and will be pivotal in making the acquisition a success.

I also implemented a wholesale change to the terms and conditions moving from paper based to a link and eliminating all old versions of the T&Cs so all customers were on one set, another key step in scaling the business for future growth.

What do you see as an opportunity or risk over the next six months?

AI without a shadow of a doubt. My CEO is passionate about the business using AI to facilitate growth, optimise operational efficiency and innovate. This of course is both an opportunity and a risk and those kinds of challenges are the most rewarding when working in house. If AI is the next technology revolution we will see, then helping our business navigate that successfully to enable us to reach our £100 million goal by 2030 will be rewarding, challenging, head scratching and exciting all at once.

What do you think are the most important attributes for a modern in house counsel to possess?

Relationships are key to building your knowledge of the organisation you work in. It’s simple, if you don’t understand your own business, how can you advise it to grow? You need to be deeply commercial and flexible in your approach, with resilience built in so you can navigate obstacles and rely on strong internal relationships to guide and influence business‑critical decisions.

In your role, how do you balance the need to protect the organisations interests today while also considering legal implications and opportunities that may arise in the future.

No one has a crystal ball, and predicting the future is a fool’s game. It is a delicate balance in making a judgement over a situation today with an eye on tomorrow, but really that level of uncertainty isn’t healthy for a business to build its strategy on or grow. It’s best to deal in facts as much as possible and try and inject some options for the business to switch paths if things change.

Have you had any experiences during your career as a lawyer that stand out as particularly unique or interesting?

I was at a gala dinner once in Barcelona when one of my sales colleagues excitedly comes up to me displaying a Rolex watch he’d just been given by a distributor. Can I keep it he says expectantly? One look from me told him he couldn’t and he walked away.