About

Team size: Three

Major legal advisers: Osborne Clark, Keystone

What would you say are the most important transactions and litigations that you’ve been involved in, in the last year?

The big one for us is that we sold the company. We announced the acquisition of the company in February, and had been working on that for a long time. We were acquired Great Hill Partners, a private equity firm headquartered in Boston. As you can probably imagine, most of our time was spent on finalising this deal. My background is in M&A which was a huge help, and after five years at the company we managed to bring it to sale, which has meant a really busy last few months including long hours.

While that’s been our biggest project, we also had a lot of background work relating to Brexit preparation.

Was Notonthehighstreet affected by any of the trade or logistics issues relating to Brexit?

We’re a marketplace, and not a retailer, which puts us in a different position than many other companies. We have 5000 small British businesses that sell on our site; we provide the platform and make them available to the world. What’s been really interesting from the Brexit perspective that has affected us as a company is related to things like data and VAT.

But our partners – our sellers – have been affected by Brexit and the pandemic a lot more than we have been. And what we’ve had to do as a business is support them. One of the things we did as part of this during the pandemic was that we opened up our legal and our people teams to their partners and had clinics where we got to help them think through their business problems they were having as a result of the pandemic.

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

As well as being on the legal team, I’m also on the executive team at the company, so when the pandemic arose, I was looking at it both as a leader of the company but also as the general counsel.

When we first looked at the pandemic, we were very aware that retail was going to be enormously impacted, so we started off by doing a whole series of planning scenarios. This was a very weird time because we were sitting there coming up with worst case scenarios, but then, almost overnight people were locked down and everyone was not only wanting to buy online, but they were very aware of wanting to buy local and support more small businesses.

All our planning scenarios which envisaged our sales being 90 to 100% down went out the window, and we were suddenly finding sales up over 100%. Our brand really resonated with people, because we do connect people with each other. This was undoubtedly one of the reasons that the acquisition came up.

Are there any standout technologies that you use now that you didn’t use before the pandemic?

Google has really to come into its own during pandemic. Google Hangouts worked brilliantly and documents are collaborative because everything is uploaded to the cloud. We already used Google, so it wasn’t exactly an innovation, but what it did was enable us to work really effectively from home. We also use Slack as a business, which has been really effective as a way of keeping the company communicating together.

All in all, these technologies already existed for us, but the pandemic meant they became absolutely central to us all working together effectively.

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

As someone with experience of both, I think the in-house role is fundamentally different to the private practice one. As an in-house lawyer, we’re not necessarily legal technicians. We understand the law, and the framework we must operate in. But we are really risk assessors first and foremost; we look at situations and points out what can go ahead, what can’t go ahead, and what needs more work. We’re constantly scanning the horizon, looking at what’s in front of us and auditing. That, for me, is the essence of the role in short.

We’re dealing with huge change now, and I think an important role that the legal team can play is to be consistent throughout this while helping others as much as possible. There are so many ways in which we’re impacted, that we have to watching out and being ready for these changes, while prioritising and triaging.

Kate Burns left Notonthehighstreet in April 2021 after the firm’s sale to a private equity firm.