About

Team size: 60

What are the most important transactions and litigations that you have been involved in during the last year?

The disposal of Kingfisher’s business in Russia, Castorama Russia, to a local buyer, and acquisition of Kingfisher’s first digital platform, Needhelp, a French start-up that links customers to tradespeople for the completion of do-it-for-me and home-related projects. Also, the launch of franchising for Kingfisher, with the launch of the B&Q brand and model in Saudi Arabia, and our new commercial strategy which implies a complete overhaul of our commercial contracting and the change in locus of our commercial contracting from a single centralised group buying function to individual contracting on a per retailer basis in each of our geographies, multiplying the number of contracts the legal team handles. Lastly, there was daily adaptations to changing local legislation regarding store openings during Covid-19.

What were the main difficulties your company faced during the initial Covid-19 lockdown?

Kingfisher operates DIY stores across the UK, France, Ireland and Poland as its principal geographies, and also in Spain, Portugal, Romania and through a JV in Turkey. The difficulties differed from jurisdiction to jurisdiction but, overall, the trajectory of events and significant difficulties addressed was consistent.

Starting from 14 March 2020 when the French and Spanish governments closed all stores in those countries to the public, we faced a period in which all of our stores were closed, further to the introduction of sanitary measures by national governments in connection with Covid-19. Between that date and mid-May 2020, we rode a rollercoaster in which store closures across all our relevant geographies had a significant impact on the business. Specific focus on targeted legal advice for the legal boards of both the plc and all of our operating companies was required in that time to ensure that we successfully negotiated the operational and legal challenges occasioned by a period of very limited trading – a first in the history of the Group.

Once it was established – in all relevant jurisdictions except Spain – that our activities were categorised as ‘essential’ and our stores could re-open, we went through a period of ensuring that the sanitary conditions for the work of our store-based colleagues were sufficiently robust to permit people to return to their workplaces. Only when these measures had been truly achieved did we start operations again.

Since then, as Covid-19 has prompted differing and shifting governmental reactions across our geographic base, we have had the resilience and the knowledge to flex between keeping stores open and closing them; providing and massively developing our online click-and-collect and home delivery capacity when in-store purchases were prohibited, and moving across these different operational and new legal challenges on a smooth carousel, all the while ensuring the health and safety of our colleagues and our customers.

What were the main steps you took to protect the business once it became clear we were in the midst of an unprecedented challenge?

The chief initial steps taken to protect the business were financial and operational and depended also on the successful negotiation of state-sponsored facilities in the UK and in France. Operationally, and with our stores closed because of the sanitary situation, we had to move quickly to provide online offerings that supported both click-and-collect and delivery options.

Underlying this ‘front office’ action, there were important efforts to ensure the stability of the teams – both the populations that were furloughed and also those who continued to work remotely and had to pick up the lion’s share of demanding new and changing work in the absence of colleagues on furlough.

In this fast-moving and fast-changing environment of the early months of the pandemic, tremendous resilience was required to address the new and voluminous range of legal issues that arose for the business on a daily basis. The new legal issues ranged from those connected to the protocols for the health and safety of store-based populations who were allowed to return to work once we were declared an ‘essential’ business during Covid-19, to dense corporate finance issues connected with the negotiation of the state-sponsored and also commercial facilities in the UK and France, to the underlying GDPR and data security issues that arose through the shift to significant on-line activities of click-and-collect and the need to ensure that customer data was properly protected for these activities.

Once the business had stabilised and the ‘essential’ status of our stores had been established in each of our markets, the challenge became one of holding the course with the teams with a very different kind of long-term stamina and resilience to ensure that we continued to deliver legal support at top levels at the same time as individual team members struggled with the psychological effects of long term confinement, and acceptance of the reality that we were not in for a ‘short sprint’ but for a long haul in the Covid-19 tunnel.

In this regard, it is noteworthy that – as highlighted at ‘the most important transactions and litigations of the year’, above – our team showed the resilience to continue to work on ‘BAU’ projects in addition to providing support on all the emerging crisis issues connected with Covid-19 and its onset. It is this balance between crisis-related support for business continuity and continued progress and successful achievement of significant BAU projects that best illustrates the extraordinary resilience of the Kingfisher legal & compliance team through the Covid-19 crisis. Undoubtedly, the team’s ability to provide both exceptional and ‘usual’ legal advice to our business in all its aspects significantly contributed to the quick recovery of the business once we were trading again.

How did your team’s approach – to both working habits and the legal tasks at hand – differ or adapt from the first lockdown to the second and third? What have been the main lessons learned?

As a team operating across geographies, our working habits have not shifted in sync as the national regulations relating to the opening of DIY and the retail sector differ across territories. As such, while our UK team has lived through three distinct lockdowns, our broader teams have dealt with different approaches to Covid-19 and different periods of confinement, as well as curfews, lockdown and partial lockdowns (parts of stores closed, while other parts of the stores could remain open). The challenge has been to motivate and energise each of these different teams as they deal with their specific set of restrictions at any given time.

From this experience, it is possible to conclude that, for office-based populations (as opposed to those working in retail shops), the UK’s regime has been the most resolutely non-office based over the last twelve months. Our French, Polish, Romanian, Spanish and Turkish colleagues have had the opportunity to return to regular office-based work, even though this office presence can be intermittent.

In that, it is possible to observe that the teams which have, arguably, undergone the greatest adaptation to long-term home working are those in the UK. This has had significant effects over time, with many individuals facing mental health challenges that now require them to take time off, as well as physical strains from long time work in sub-optimal working conditions. These mental health and physical challenges have become considerably more pronounced in the third lockdown.

If the first UK lockdown – like that in all jurisdictions – was characterised by fear and uncertainty and needed to be managed as such, with a relatively short-term ‘coping’ strategy as all adjusted to the new reality, the third lockdown has been characterised by persons struggling with despair, isolation and physical ailments linked to long-term home working in unassessed work stations.

In order to try to address and to support these challenges in the UK, we have offered a range of support for the legal and compliance teams. These include, instituting a number of different sessions with external facilitators to provide practical sessions for team members with advice on balancing work and personal life while working in confinement at home; ensuring daily team meetings in smaller teams and very regular weekly one to one catch-ups with all in the team; introducing bi-weekly team sessions where we come together for ‘social’ sessions to touch base and to discuss a variety of topics not related to work, and introducing professional ‘Strengths’ training from Gallup, which is a highly personalised and uplifting way of working with each team member to focus on their individual strengths and the things they contribute uniquely to the team. It has been affirming for team members to recognise all the contributions they are making that are uniquely their own and very important, in spite of the challenge that Covid-19 has presented in individual’s working and personal lives.

In what ways do you see the in-house legal role evolving over the next few years?

The challenge of Covid-19 has provided a unique opportunity for the in-house legal team to really showcase its involvement in the end-to-end processes of the retail business.

In our case, our business has also been affected by Brexit, so Brexit-preparedness on top of the work done to support the Covid-19-struck business really highlighted the fact that the in-house legal role profoundly understands all aspects of our business and can ensure its continuity in the face of multiple simultaneous challenges. Properly anticipating and addressing legal challenges up-front ensures on-going business continuity; the business now understands this better and more clearly.

As a prime advisor to executive management and to the Board, in-house legal will continue to shape the culture of a company, assuring business continuity and lawful agility on the one hand, along with pragmatic and appropriate compliance and ethical guidance to the business on the other.

Legal in-house is uniquely placed to support the business both in operations and in strategic direction under the overall umbrella of ethical compliance. The challenges of Covid-19, compounded, in our sector, by Brexit, have set the in-house legal role up to become an ever-strengthening one.