Royal Mail – GC Powerlist
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United Kingdom Teams 2022

Transport and infrastructure

Royal Mail

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United Kingdom Teams 2022

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Team size: Approximately 150

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

Royal Mail’s legal team deals with a wide range of matters, from significant regulatory, competition and litigation issues, to major property, construction projects, corporate and commercial contracting concerns, and employment relations law issues. We also have health and safety, criminal and personal injury specialists.

Coming out of Covid-19, a key focus for the team has been advising on challenging competition law and regulatory issues, driving the business’ transformation by being strategic advisors on significant projects that will re-invent Royal Mail.

We have led the response to complex investigations in the regulatory and competition space, and have also played a pivotal role in supporting business transformation by designing, planning, and contracting technology for our now open Northwest Super Hub. We are playing a similar role in our under-construction Midlands Super Hub. The team also advised on complex labour model reorganisations, and ended a multi-year property sale and redevelopment project of a vast southwest London site as part of the Nine Elms redevelopment area.

Looking forward, what technological advancements do you feel will impact the role of in-house legal teams in the future the most? Which have you found most useful in your legal team?

Undoubtedly, one of the most significant and successful changes we have made to how we work in the legal team was the introduction of a full-service, front-door portal that business colleagues go through first to receive legal advice. The portal contains generic documents for self-serve contracting aligned with our risk appetite, toolkits and training materials. This has significantly reduced the amount of low value repeat work from business colleagues and freed up lawyers to support more complex work while reducing external instructions because of greater in-house capacity. As tech becomes more accessible and legal teams more confident shifting legal risk to business colleagues, self-serve will likely be a trend that is increasingly adopted.

How has the increasing consciousness of climate change and sustainability affected your company and the team’s priorities?

Our company has embraced environmental and social responsibilities as an iconic British business with a significant real estate footprint in the UK. Over the last year, a cross-legal team working group of commercial, environment, and real estate lawyers have come together to work on major business projects to drive forward our ESG plans. Sharing best practice, building external networks and adapting to new areas of law, the team have delivered projects including procuring 3,000 electric vans, electrifying the estate, entering energy-saving partnerships contracts and constructing two super hubs with state-of-the-art environmental credentials from rainwater roofing to a new integrated train station to reduce vehicle emissions.

Mark Amsden

Few in-house legal teams received as many nominations as the Royal Mail Group this year, with GC Maaike de Bie regularly cited by both private practice firms and other in-house...

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