| Barclays
Barclays
Freeze the regulatory environment of today and Barclays group GC Bob Hoyt believes the 740-strong legal team would still have a lot of work to understand and safely operate the financial services giant within that legal framework. But add to that how dynamic the framework is, and how much regulation is changing in the US and UK, and that job gets even harder. ‘For an institution like ours that offers so many products and services across so many jurisdictions, it is remarkably complex.’ Barclays has faced intense public scrutiny in recent years: from the Serious Fraud Office’s investigation into the bank’s £12bn fundraising at the height of the financial crisis, which resulted in criminal charges against the bank and former executives relating to a £2.3bn loan Barclays provided to Qatar, a multibillion-dollar legal battle with the US Department of Justice over allegedly-fraudulent mortgages and a New York currency trading probe that ended in a $150m settlement. There have been other significant projects too, such as the industry ring-fencing reforms that saw Barclays take the decision in March 2016 to split into two divisions: Barclays UK and Barclays International. Hoyt says: ‘Structural reform is a massively legallycomplex operation and we’ve had teams handling everything from the way it affects our customers, in particular our retail customers, but also effectively doing M&A work, moving things between entities smoothly.’ Brexit also creates a large volume of work for the in-house team, as it did the nuts-and-bolts preparation regarding where businesses might be best located, and how they would be moved there post Brexit. With so much going on, it is easy to see why Barclays has such a large in-house team: 466 staff based in the UK, 167 in the US and the remainder dotted elsewhere. There was previously a team in Africa as well, before Barclays sold part of its stake in the African business for £2.2bn in mid-2017. Hoyt says he has a terrific leadership team and in the past few years has focused on the tier just below them to develop and identify talent internally. This involves lawyers working across different practice areas, giving them more varied experience, and provides a deeper pool of professionals with the type of background you would expect of a GC. The team is also 60% female and its leadership is 42% female. Hoyt remarks: ‘Most law firms would be very happy to have those numbers, but we know we have further to go.’ Technology is a big challenge for the team, both in terms of new banking products but also in upskilling its lawyers. It has a suite of technology in place that provides metrics on how the group is operating, from matter management to e-billing and time recording, and intends to study its processes and bring in new technology to drive efficiency. The in-house team is supported by operations professionals Alison Gaskins, who is chief of staff ; head of business management Jon Doyle; and head of commercial management Stéphanie Hamon. Hoyt says this has given Barclays a firm grip on both its internal and ‘very substantial’ external spend. ‘If you just step back and look at it as a commercial matter, a unit of the bank that manages this very large area of spend, it would be crazy not to have business professionals bringing cutting-edge practice to how you manage that.’
