Vodafone rejigs legal team in bid to keep pace
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Vodafone UK has drastically overhauled its in-house legal capacity as rivals Orange UK and T-Mobile UK eye a tie-up that, if successful, would create the UK’s largest mobile provider and push Vodafone into third place behind O2.
Vodafone has set up five new legal teams focusing on property, dispute resolution and employment, enterprise, consumer, and infrastructure and projects. Five members of the 100-strong legal and regulatory department will run each of these sub-departments.
The team heads will report to David Foley, who in August was promoted to the newly created role of head of legal by legal and government affairs director Justine Campbell.
“We’ve had a huge amount of change in the industry,” Campbell said. “We’re now in a state of transformation and turnaround in Vodafone UK. We’ve come from a heritage of being the biggest mobile operator in the UK to being outpaced slightly.
“We’re changing the business culture, we’re in challenger mode and we’re looking at the relationships with customers and trying to make pricing schemes simpler.”
Campbell also plans to develop knowledge management and online capability for the entire business, reducing independence on individual lawyers advising on run-of-the-mill issues.
“I need to free up some of the legal team from day-to-day to do more strategic work,” said Campbell.
