About

Team size: 200
Major law firms used: Baker McKenzie, Gowling WLG, Osborne Clarke, Eversheds Sutherland, Kim & Chang, Kirkland & Ellis, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom

In January, Dyson announced 2018 profit grew 33% to top £1bn for the first time and it was moving its headquarters from the UK to Singapore – a move that drew widespread criticism given billionaire founder and Brexiteer Sir James Dyson’s calls on the UK government to leave the EU without a deal. Dyson’s chief executive Jim Rowan denied the move was to do with Brexit or tax but said it was about future proofing the business and gearing up for expansive growth in Asia. Dyson is spending billions on bringing an electric car to market by 2021 and the company had already announced that a new factory would be in Singapore.

‘Dyson is making the transition from a domestic product company to a global, fully fledged technology company,’ GC Martin Bowen says. ‘We’re pursuing not only the car but various battery technologies.’
For Bowen, this has meant ensuring his legal team is at the forefront of such initiatives, with patent filing an integral part of the wider business strategy. The legal team has grown from about 170 to 200, with the team in China more than doubling to nine lawyers. A team of four specialist automotive lawyers will be embedded in Singapore over the next 12 months, given that cars are very different to Dyson’s traditional product base.

‘Although we continue to do a huge amount of work here in the UK from a sales perspective, Asia is an area that we have to grow and develop,’ Bowen comments. ‘We’ve been getting to grips over the last couple of years with the various disciplines of doing business in China, South Korea and Indonesia.’

In 2018, Dyson also won a long-running legal battle with the European Commission over the energy labelling of vacuum cleaners. Dyson had challenged legislation on testing and labelling vacuum cleaners’ energy performance, arguing that performing those tests on empty machines did not reflect real use. ‘That was a tremendous success. It’s an enormously difficult thing to do to overturn a piece of European regulation, and to take the Commission to the EU courts and win.’