What are the key projects that you have been involved in over the past 12 months?

When I joined Ki in March 2024, the two priority areas were to establish the Ki Legal and Regulatory team (of which I was the first member!) and to support the significant project, already underway, to separate Ki from its parent company. Hugely important strategically, independence would allow Ki to focus on its strategy as a digital follower in the Lloyd’s of London insurance market, further developing its distinctive technology capability and unique culture in the market. 

Have you had any experiences during your career as a lawyer that stand out as particularly unique or interesting?

Yes, supporting the legal separation of Ki definitely falls into the category of both unique and interesting! 

To hit the ground running and add value from the outset, the team needed to get up to speed quickly with the organisation; understand the dynamics with the shareholders and other key stakeholders; and build relationships inside and outside of Ki that would help enable the separation.   

The first challenge was to identify and mitigate risks, so that we could help to remove any blockers and get each stage of the project across the line safely and on time. 

Secondly, with just the General Counsel at the outset, external support was clearly going to be needed, with a request for proposal process resulting in us instructing Clifford Chance LLP. 

The third challenge was the number of different agreements to be negotiated simultaneously, some with multiple parties, and all with multiple stakeholders. Having learnt from some challenges crossing the line for the first project milestone, we engaged with the different stakeholders using a combination of regular meetings, ad hoc calls and board paper briefings, to make sure that there were no surprises in terms of what each future milestone would involve and by when it would be achieved.   

Feedback has been that the team worked with passion and energy, making complex legal points easily understandable and tackling issues head on to drive them to resolution quickly and effectively, supporting the achievement of the goal of legal separation and managing agent novation by the target date of 1 January 2025.   

Based on your experiences in the past year, are there any trends in the legal or business world that you are keeping an eye on, of which you think other in-house lawyers should be mindful? 

There has been an increase in the responsibility being placed on organisations in terms of preventative duties, including, in some cases, in relation to the acts of those outside the company. I have seen this trend manifest itself firstly in the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 (ECCTA), which comes into force on 1 September. ECCTA introduces a new failure to prevent fraud offence, under which companies will be criminally liable for fraud committed by their associates (including employees, subsidiaries, but also agents) unless they have reasonable fraud prevention procedures in place. Not only is there no requirement for anyone senior in the company to be aware of the fraud for there to be liability, but there is also no need for the company itself to be aware at all, if it is an agent committing the fraud.

The second area where I have seen this trend is the duty of employers to prevent sexual harassment of their employees, which came into effect on 26 October 2024 through an amendment to the Equality Act 2010 and again requires reasonable preventative steps to be taken. In a similar way to the failure to prevent fraud duty, this requires employers to anticipate the risks of sexual harassment happening and take reasonable steps to prevent them. There is the potential for employees to be able to claim for third-party harassment in the future under a proposal in the Employment Rights Bill.