About

Team size: 6
Major law firms used: Pinsent Masons, RPC, Slaughter and May

‘One of our challenges is to buck the perception that all construction is bad,’ says the GC of Morgan Sindall Group, Helen Mason. Not that easy, particularly in the wake of the collapse of construction giant Carillion and with well-documented troubles at construction outsourcer Kier Group. ‘Our focus is on consolidation, building our profit margins, continuing to do what we do best in the markets we do it best in,’ Mason notes.

Morgan Sindall has a portfolio of six divisions, comprising construction and infrastructure,
fit out, property services, partnership housing, urban regeneration and investments. Its profits grew 42% to £52m on revenue of £2.8bn for the year to 31 December 2017.

Mason joined as the group’s first GC from Fieldfisher in 2014, and has a team of six lawyers split between the construction and infrastructure and urban regeneration divisions. In the years after she joined, Mason advised on two multimillion-pound disputes simultaneously and says there is now no ongoing major litigation against the group.

‘The focus really has been on embedding the lawyers as business partners and we’ve established the Morgan Sindall Business Academy, which is within the construction and infrastructure division, to provide training and development so that we’re seen as the providers of support rather than the ones to come and tell when it all goes wrong.’

Alongside the legal-led academy has been the implementation of a compliance learning management system to deliver training on areas such as the Bribery Act and GDPR. Mason says this has helped with compliance because it is auditable and therefore helps with winning work, because the company can present customers with what people learned and how.

‘It’s rock-and-roll stuff – if you’re having trouble sleeping let me send it through. But seriously, our colleagues like doing it and have competitions about how well they each did, which has really surprised me.’