Stephen Godsell – GC Powerlist
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United Kingdom 2019

Stephen Godsell

TMT | Guardian Media Group

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United Kingdom 2019

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Stephen Godsell

TMT | Guardian Media Group

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Team size: 4
Major law firms used: Ashfords, Baker McKenzie, Bristows, DAC Beachcroft, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Greenberg Traurig, MinterEllison

Three years ago, The Guardian was running a significant operating loss, sapped by the ever-waning influence of print journalism. Even with a substantial £1bn endowment fund, the business was not sustainable. A radical three-year cost-saving plan was drawn up to get the business making profits again. GC Stephen Godsell and the rest of the in-house legal function were not excluded from the endeavour. ‘We are considerably smaller than we used to be,’ Godsell observes. ‘It has meant we’ve had to do things in a much more focused and efficient way.’

One of the innovative ways Godsell reacted to the limitations was with what he calls a ‘triage system’, which determines the importance of a legal matter. Based on a series of questions, a mandate deemed not as important would be redirected to external counsel, leaving the more skilled work to be dealt with in-house.

He comments: ‘It works quite well because it doesn’t need supervision by one of our full-time lawyers.’ Some of the high-level work undertaken by his legal team includes advising on the creation of The Ozone Project, an online advertising business formed collaboratively with The Sun publisher News UK and The Daily Telegraph. It was formulated in response to demand from advertisers for a one-stop shop to buy digital adverts across the UK’s leading news sites. It also aims to redress the balance in the continued siphoning of advertising revenues to the likes of Google and Facebook.

A major aspect of the cost-saving plan, The Guardian agreed an outsourcing deal, led by deputy GC Lucy Mee, with Trinity Mirror to redesign its newspaper format, going from a unique but expensive Berliner format to a tabloid layout. Godsell insists it was a key deal for the business: ‘It may not sound like a dramatic commercial deal, but from a trust perspective, to outsource our printing, which we’ve kept in-house for so long, was a really big step and required extensive negotiations.’

Godsell has drawn praise from his peers in the industry. Angus McBride, GC of News UK, comments: ‘He is very bright. Obviously [The Guardian] is not the first place someone from News UK would point out! But he’s very commercial, more so than me.’

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