Team size: 40 

What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?  

On the privacy front, I am not sure people realise how many government departments and agencies want access to bank data to help them with their own, often noble, causes. Examples include: the gambling industry looking to reduce problem gamblers, or agencies seeking to reduce fraud. However, we have to balance customers’ right to privacy and confidentiality along with these aims and that is not straightforward. On most of these issues, we work with other banks through our trade body, UK Finance, and our privacy team is often the one driving the discussion and ensuring we advocate for customers and their rights, whilst equally trying to support the banking and wider sectors’ strategic aims to reduce societal harm. We will often be the first bank in a discussion to raise privacy concerns, and have such have become a regular sounding board for UK Finance to discuss issues with and seek advice from as we seek to balance the competing rights and harms. 

Can you foresee any key developments to the way general counsel work over the next five years?  

We need to be working differently and be open to having different skillsets in our functions. We are very lucky that our own legal governance and regulatory affairs function is made up of a whole variety of experts – we have corporate governance and regulatory affairs professionals, investigators, eDisclosure experts, and colleagues focused on risk, finance, reporting and technology and innovation amongst others.  That gives us incredible diversity of thought and experience and we need more of that across the profession and a move away from a historic focus on qualified lawyers. We know lots of organisations are starting to bring in data scientists and project managers.   

As the legal landscape evolves, what steps are you taking to foster a culture of continuous learning and development within the legal team, ensuring that they are all well-equipped to address future legal complexities?  

One of the core pillars of our bank’s purpose, is to be a learning organisation – and so this is extremely important to us. As part of our function People Board initiatives, which I sponsor, we have always focused on learning and development but are always looking for ways to improve. We have recently relaunched our own LG&RA Learning Community looking at thematic issues to upskill colleagues across the function on, including a mixture of technical and legal skills, across all the disciplines we cover in the function. We have identified a number of core themes for everyone to be upskilled in, and soft skills that go with that.