Lush becomes ICL's legal director after December's departure from Billiton

Lush has since joined IT services company ICL as its commercial and legal director. The £20bn merger last year between BHP and Billiton meant that only one of the two heads of legal for the respective companies would win the position of legal head of the combined company. The role was given to BHP's chief general counsel John Fast, who is based in Melbourne. Lush had been general counsel at Billiton for just under two years.
Lush is looking forward to his new role at ICL. "I've moved away from being just general counsel," he said. "My new role is based more on the commercial side, with people reporting to me from legal commercial as well as procurement."
Lush has 130 people across the globe reporting to him in his new role, although only 21 are lawyers compared with 23 lawyers at Billiton.
ICL is undergoing a rebranding and reorganisation. The company will shortly be changing its name to Fujitsu, the main shareholder of ICL. Trained lawyer Richard Christou has recently been appointed the new chief executive officer of ICL.
ICL has a loose panel of lawyers, tending to use Linklaters for finance and M&A work, Masons for PFI work and Eversheds for property work.
The company also in-structs US firm Mayer Brown Rowe & Maw (formerly Mayer Brown & Platt). Lush is already familiar with Linklaters and Mayer Brown from his days at Billiton.
Lush said that there were no plans to shake up the legal panel, but added: "We'll be looking to make our outsourcing of legal services more efficient."