Mark Richards, one of the UK's most highly regarded legal specialists in nuclear energy, talks to Alex Aldridge about his decision to move in-house with CH2M Hill

Mark Richards, international operations chief counsel at US engineering firm CH2M Hill, is pleased to be back in the office. He recently returned from Abu Dhabi, where he spent much of last year leading the primary contractor selection on United Arab Emirates' nuclear power programme, which CH2M Hill is project managing – a baptism of fire to a job that Richards began in September 2008. It has been an interesting project, he says, but has not left much time to get to grips with the other elements of his newly-created London-based role.

"Nuclear is only one element of what we do," he explains, adding that being back at CH2M Hill's European base in Hammersmith has allowed him to engage in other matters such as the water, transportation and industrial projects in which the company is also involved.

Still, nuclear is Richards' undoubted speciality, and one of the major reasons CH2M Hill, which has ambitions to expand its nuclear operations in the UK, brought him in – the former Pinsent Masons partner is recognised as one of only a handful of genuine legal experts in the sector in the UK. As these individuals are keen to point out, there is no such thing as a 'nuclear lawyer', rather planning, regulatory, corporate or construction lawyers with a specialism in the nuclear sector.

Richards' background is in construction, meaning that overseeing the raft of high-profile general projects on which CH2M Hill is currently working – including the 2012 Olympics, CrossRail and the Thames Tideway Scheme – is within his comfort zone. He is assisted by Geoff Roberts, his former partner in Pinsents' projects team, who joined as international major projects counsel in September last year, taking CH2M Hill's non-US legal team to 11.

One of the early challenges Richards has set himself is to get better value from law firms – hence the competition he initiated in August among CH2M Hill's clutch of regular legal advisers to gain places on a slimmed down M&A roster, with the result set to be announced this month.

He explains what he is looking for: "We're seeking innovative ideas from experienced lawyers who really add value to our business. We are not interested in the usual leverage model where clients end up with a small army of junior lawyers professing specialisms simply because they happen to work in a particular department and where work gets supervised and re-supervised." Richards adds that he is undecided whether or not to launch similar competitions for other practice areas.

With plenty of legal work expected to be generated by the new wave of UK nuclear power stations currently in the pipeline – and CH2M Hill hoping to play a major role in putting them together – there would be plenty of interest among law firms if a wider panel review were conducted. "It's funny, because nuclear used to be such an unfashionable area," says Richards, who got into nuclear in the mid-1990s as a result of a chance mandate he won to advise the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) on a project to make safe the hurriedly-constructed protective concrete shell erected around the Chernobyl nuclear power station in the wake of the accident in 1986.

"But now," he adds, "as it's become clear that nuclear is going to play a key part in this country's energy strategy, suddenly many of the top law firms are falling over themselves to declare their expertise in something that, until quite recently, nobody wanted to be associated with."

As a way of illustrating the changing status of the nuclear industry, Richards gives the example of a recent Nuclear Industry Association meeting that took place in a "packed lecture theatre", with most of the major law firms represented. Just a few years ago, though, the scene was very different. "In the mid to late-90s it was 10 people around a table with a plate of sandwiches in a little room," recalls Richards. "And only two lawyers used to go: a lady from Simmons & Simmons called Juliet Reingold, [Reingold became a partner at Simmons in 1998], and myself."

Not that the change has taken him by surprise – Richards quickly realised in the wake of Chernobyl and the various eastern European decommissioning projects he subsequently advised on, that the UK was itself in line for a wave of decommissioning work, as many of the country's nuclear power stations neared the end of their working lives.

At the same time, conversations Richards was having during the early part of the last decade with some of the leading figures in the industry, such as Tim Stone (now KPMG corporate finance infrastructure and projects chairman and special adviser to the Government on nuclear decommissioning), began to convince him that the only way the UK was going to meet its Kyoto commitments to cut carbon emissions was through embarking on the construction of a new round of nuclear power stations.

Having gleaned all this nuclear expertise – and then seen it assume a premium position within law firms – why did Richards decide to move in-house?

"Quality of work," he responds. "I'd been a partner at Pinsents for years and, to be honest, I wasn't a big fan of the cultural impact of the merger [between Masons and Pinsent Curtis in 2004], which I felt led to an over-emphasis on who's billed the most hours. I got rather tired of that."

Life at CH2M Hill, with which Richards had a relationship at Pinsents going back several years, is "obviously different to life in a law firm, but in terms of collegiality and spirit of adventure, not entirely dissimilar to Masons in the old days.

"And it's also nice," he adds, "not to be thought of as a unit of production anymore."

Career timeline

1982: Completes law degree at Birmingham University
1983: Takes articles with Braby & Waller
1988: Moves to Masons (now Pinsent Masons)
1993: Makes partner in Masons' construction team
1997: Acts for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) on the continuing decommissioning of Chernobyl
1999-2007: Advises on major nuclear decommissioning projects in Slovakia, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Ukraine
2008: Joins CH2M Hill as international operations chief counsel