Royal Mail has launched a ‘Crisis Response App’ developed by its in-house team to help the business react more effectively to a dawn raid or investigation by regulators.
The in-house team at Royal Mail, led by general counsel Maaike de Bie, has already rolled out a pilot of the app to be tested by management and board-level staff at the company and will soon be extended to the wider staff.
“As our company is doing a lot of transformation in tech, the legal function has thought about how to deliver legal advice,” de Bie told The Lawyer.
“As a company, we are often on the move but everyone will always have their mobile phones with them. We were mindful of dawn raids and crisis response, so we created an app in-house and they can click on it and give a list of relevant lawyers to contact and relevant do’s or don’ts.”
The app will allow staff to press a button to access numbers of relevant in-house teams to contact in the event of an approach from a regulator, providing useful information on what steps to follow.
But the development of this app does not mean that Royal Mail is guarding itself against a future incident, de Bie said.
“It’s about being well prepared. It’s just giving people key information and things to think about when. It’s connecting all of those dots to make sure that the staff understand what to do.”
Royal Mail’s app development signals a wider trend in the in-house market. Many in-house teams are exploring the options of launching their own in-house technology. One example of in-house innovation via an app is Pernod Ricard, which launched a contracts app last year.
