Spotlight on Legal Transformation with Andrea Murray

Andrea is a Legal Director at Virgin Media. In addition to leading the Competition & Regulatory and Real Estate teams, she supports the General Counsel in departmental, development and operational matters.  Andrea talks to us about her views on the transformation of the legal industry and in particular how this is shifting the focus of the legal team at Virgin Media.

What is the structure of the legal team at Virgin Media?

We're a small legal team with around 37 individuals made up of lawyers, paralegals, specialists and team assistants who all play their part in supporting the vast majority of the business’ legal needs in-house.

Our recent approach has been primarily to structure the team in a way which is aligned to the business divisions (for example dedicated lawyers for our B2B division) so we can closely interact with their stakeholders and are aware of their priorities. Senior lawyers join the leadership teams of each commercial division, where they are empowered and expected to give not only an informed legal view, but also a commercial perspective on strategic matters. Alongside that we have our specialists (e.g. employment, competition or litigation) who support all areas of the business but are equally commercially focussed in their approach. One of the areas of focus for transformation is about agility within our team and the breaking down of silos. Our team is much smaller than most of our competitors, so we need to ensure that our team can be adaptable and flexible so that lawyers can support other areas when the need arises, so that we can be truly cross-functional. This is important not just for the business, but also for individuals' career development as this creates new stretch opportunities.

Could you tell me about how the legal team's priorities fit in with the business's key objectives?

I’ll start with a little context: Virgin Media redefined its purpose earlier this year which is to "build connections which really matter" with a goal to become the most recommended brand among both its employees and customers. These two things underpin Virgin Media’s strategic objectives and priorities and in turn define the legal team's priorities. Our team has to be constantly alive to spending time on the contracts/matters/projects that really make a difference to those aims. Naturally, these objectives are not static and in a dynamic, competitive market we have to flex our resource to adapt to changing priorities. That's why it is important for us to understand what is happening in the market more generally so we can anticipate what is coming down the line, for example a new piece of regulation which results in business change .

What are your key priorities when it comes to legal transformation?

The core priority is to continue building our own version of the legal team of the future: a cross-functional team with the right skillsets and behaviours coupled with the right legal support model for each particular type of work in order to maximise the value of the in-house team and to create development opportunities.

How are you looking to achieve this?

There are a number of initiatives we're driving, including re-aligning some of the legal functions by moving the higher volume but lower value work (i.e. the more commoditised work) away from the lawyers based in London and Reading. We are doing this in a number of ways- firstly, our B2B lawyers have invested a significant amount of time devising a training programme to upskill commercial B2B sales colleagues, and creating a legal playbook to address risk so that our sales teams become more self-sufficient, allowing the lawyers to concentrate their time on the larger contracts that deliver the most value for the company. Secondly, we're working with our colleagues in the Claims department in Bradford to utilise the paralegals and legal resource in that team. The best parallel I can draw is with Ashurst Advance’s Glasgow team. Historically, the Bradford team was focussed on insurance and personal injury claims, but the investment they have made in their paralegal resource and case management tools means we are looking to move some work (for example procurement contract variations and straightforward lease renewals) to their appropriately qualified, but lower cost resource. We do also need to turn our attention to technology to examine how the use of data management and AI can assist us in the longer term.

On the people side, we are focussing on the individual development aspirations of our team members and considering what opportunities may exist both within the legal team but also the wider company. Our recruitment process for new lawyers is designed to identify whether individuals have the desire to traverse new areas or can bring a different skillset to complement the team (e.g. project management, data analytics, agile) and first and foremost identify whether they display curiosity, which is critical to being successful at Virgin Media.

What are the main challenges you anticipate facing when implementing these changes?

At the moment we're going through a process of re-contracting with the business to ensure that the lawyers are not being over-relied upon for non-priority matters (recognising that it is a tremendous compliment to the team that the business regards the lawyers as being a critical part of the overall operation). This means the business needs to buy into our vision to bring about the necessary process changes, but also requires behavioural and cultural changes and we all know that habits are sometimes hard to break. The other major challenge, which will not come as a surprise, is time given the level of investment that is required to drive this change, especially when you are a small legal team trying to deliver the priorities for the business at the same time without a dedicated legal operations function.

Are there plans to include a legal operations function in the legal team?

We are certainly thinking about how we integrate the various elements of legal operations into our approach. Given our size and brand challenger mentality, I expect where we land will be to do this in a unique way rather than having a dedicated legal operations role, for example focussed squads to address certain issues such as legal tech and analytics, legal process improvement or knowledge management. Personally I do get a bit of FOMO (fear of missing out) in this area when I read about how certain companies have legal ops individuals who can dedicate their time to nothing else, but from talking to other contacts and Ashurst clients, I realise that most in-house teams face the same challenges and each finds their own way to address the various elements through utilisation of existing resource. We are in the process of recruiting a business manager and hopefully this will be someone who can help us to deliver our transformation objectives.

What methods do you currently use to assess the performance of the legal team?

This is an area where we perhaps need to spend a bit more time thinking about how we measure value in a sophisticated way. From talking to other in–house lawyers, I know this is a hot topic and that we are not alone. Currently we assess the performance of individuals tailored to their level of seniority but with common threads relating to behaviours, technical delivery in support of the business objectives and driving team engagement. For the team, we have our own version of KPIs, i.e. we track cost savings; report on the number of contracts/projects delivered; report on efficiencies delivered; and more qualitatively convey other value-adds from the legal team. I do think there is the potential to move to a model involving objective and key results (OKRs) metrics for the legal team, with the lawyers playing an intrinsic role in delivering the business OKRs. Another metric which is important to us is feedback through employee surveys which provides us with insight about what matters to our team, particularly around career development and engagement with the commercial teams.

How can your external legal providers best support your legal team through this transformation?

I would say please help us cut through the noise around legal transformation which is sometimes overwhelming – for example I can't tell you how many emails we get about new technology service providers! It is the market knowledge and the experience gained through working with other clients, that can help us tailor solutions, improve processes and provide ideas for lawyer development that are right for us. From a legal advice standpoint, it's also about working with us to provide different models for legal support that meet that the objective of being nimble and are tailored to the issue at hand.