WINNERS

• 1st - Barclays
Led by group general counsel Mark Harding, Barclays’ legal team last year closed the most complex transaction in its history, in the form of the bank’s bid for ABN Amro. The £45bn deal, the likes of which the City will not see for a long time, saw the team work with regulations across 74 jurisdictions.
Just as importantly, the past 12 months also saw changes affecting Barclays’ 750-strong legal function – fine tuning it to further embed the general counsels of each business unit into the company. This included the creation of the group ‘toolkits’ by the corporate legal team to improve best practice among its large franchise group and the implementation of US legal spend analysis technology DataCert. The bank is working with a number of its panel – including DLA Piper, Clifford Chance, Allen & Overy and Lovells – to adapt their systems to match Barclays’ own legal spend technology.
A complex and hugely productive year, this progressive team will look back at 2007/08 as a key period where Barclays pushed its in-house legal operation to the hilt and was rewarded with skill and innovation.

• 2nd - GE Commercial Finance
With a team of over 50 legal and compliance professionals including more than 20 lawyers, GE’s in-house legal team is truly worthy of ‘stand alone’ status.
The corporate financial services Europe team grew significantly in 2007 inline with GE’s acquisitions of Banque Artesia Nederland and Merrill Lynch Capital, which boosted GE’s asset base from $16bn to $36bn. A series of complex deals, such as acting as sole arranger for Dana Corporation in a EUR170mn pan-European, multi-currency facility and the largest-ever cross border factoring deal, showed the team’s ability to handle anything thrown at it. Numerous internal awards for team work, regulatory compliance and training show its work has not gone unnoticed in the GE boardroom.

• 3rd - Royal & SunAlliance
Royal & SunAlliance’s in-house legal practice stands apart because of its core importance to the wider development of the insurance business. General counsel Neville Howe leads the insurer’s diversity programme while responsibility for the implementation of RSA’s global brand and value-added propositions for the broker community fall to others within the team. Two of the team’s members have won internal prizes for efforts that go way beyond the usual legal function remit and add value for the practice, while another is the mouth piece and media contact for its More Than brand. This integration is what impresses most at a time when the insurance industry is undergoing period of major legislative change. Plenty to be proud of in a strong year.

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Judges will be looking for evidence of:

• Innovation, either in transactional work or regulatory or compliance issues
• Management of external advisers (please detail outside counsel)
• How the legal function underpins the organisation’s risk management strategy

Submissions may focus on a single transaction or may chart the team’s progress over the course of the year.

Entries welcome from:
In-house teams	√
Nominations by private practice	√
Nominations by chambers / barristers	√

Previous Winners:
2007	Standard Chartered
2006	Royal Bank of Scotland
2005	Capital One Bank (Europe)
2004	Citigroup
2003	Royal Bank of Scotland