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Team size: 300
What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?
BT legal have been at the heart of leading matters to support the BT group this year. Our consumer and corporate teams led on the 50:50 joint venture with Warner Bros Discovery to create a new sports offering for customers in the UK. BT Sport and Eurosport UK will unite, creating the very best of live sport programming the UK. The legal team led all contractual negotiations, managed stakeholders across BT, and have worked with the competition and markets authority, who have granted their permission to allow for the creation of the joint venture.
BT legal has also led our group strategy on dealing with Russian sanctions over the last few months, standing up teams across the business to advise our key stakeholders.
Additionally, our Openreach legal team have supported the fastest roll out of fibre in the UK so that we can connect as many customers as possible to superfast services across the UK, as our networks team continue to help build our 5G mobile network.
Finally, on diversity and inclusion, I am proud to mentor two of my colleagues who are co-chairs of BT’s ethnic diversity network. The network is driving change across BT, not only making us a more inclusive organisation but serving to inspire future generations of lawyers to join our organisation.
How important is choosing to work with external lawyers who align with your company’s values? Are you likely to reconsider what firms you work with based on this?
We rigorously choose our legal panel to ensure that we align on values and practice areas. We acknowledge our role as a large employer in the UK and ensure that we get best value and a diverse range of thoughts, leadership, and people to work our projects. Diversity and inclusion play a big part of our strategy and we are holding a panel summit later this year to share with and learn from our panel on how we can collectively tackle diversity and inclusion matters in our industry.
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