About

Team size: 10
Major law firms used: Eversheds Sutherland

‘I’ve been trying to focus on what drives risk and what drives poor behaviour,’ Severn Trent group GC and company secretary Bronagh Kennedy says. ‘You’re not there to help people fix problems; you’re there to make sure they don’t happen in the first place.’

Kennedy joined the FTSE 100 water company in 2011, having previously been group GC and company secretary at Mitchells & Butlers. She oversees a team of ten, while also having two apprentices who have joined straight from school and one graduate as part of a wider company programme. She says the graduate and apprentice programmes help with a broader aim of moving the legal team away from being niche specialists to generalists. ‘The problem when lawyers come in from private practice is they’ve been trained to be quite specialist. We’re finding that having a mixture of people from private practice but also growing our own is working really well. They understand the strategic challenges of the business and therefore have a much better appreciation of risk.’

Severn Trent has a long-running sole adviser mandate with Eversheds Sutherland, operating on a five-year term until 2020. Kennedy says the arrangement provides cost certainty for Severn Trent, which has its income fixed by the regulator. Similarly, it provides Eversheds with predictable cashflow, although Kennedy is increasingly expecting extra value support, such as training and market insight.
Recent key projects include the acquisition of Dee Valley Water, which required redrawing the boundaries between English and Welsh water companies, as well as the £120m purchase of renewable energy business Agrivert.

Eversheds executive partner Ian Gray comments: ‘Bronagh is a very experienced GC who has been at FTSE 100 companies for 20 years. She has a complete mastery of her brief, and she’s completely on top of everything and has a strong projection of where she’s going. When she’s happy we really know about it and when she’s not happy we really know about it, and we like that about her.’