Barclays has emerged from the credit crunch with its empire much extended. Alex Aldridge meets the senior legal team of one of Europe's most coveted clients

Compared to other UK banks, Barclays – which fatefully lost out to Royal Bank of Scotland in the 2007 race to acquire ABN Amro – has weathered the global financial crisis pretty well: managing to avoid government bailouts and securing some smart, opportunistic acquisitions, including the takeover of the Wall Street operations of Lehman Brothers and the purchase of Standard Life Bank.

Still, there's no doubt that the crisis has had a profound effect on the bank. Fundraising in the wake of the credit crunch means that over 30% of it is now owned by investors from the Middle East. And further capital to combat the effect of the credit crisis was raised through Barclays' sale last June of its fund management division, Barclays Global Investors, to US money management firm BlackRock for £8.2bn.

There have been substantial job cuts, too, with around 2,000 positions going across the bank's investment banking and investment management divisions, with a similar level of redundancies in the retail, commercial banking and credit card units.

The 800-lawyer legal team has, however, so far come through largely unscathed. Indeed, amid all of the upheaval it has been busier than ever. "During a recession, the expertise of in-house lawyers assumes a premium. It is when you get tested," says Barclays general counsel Mark Harding, speaking at the bank's quarterly legal executive committee meeting, at which Legal Week was granted an interview slot.

A crucial part of that test, Harding expands, echoing the challenge facing many general counsel, is working out exactly how to keep costs down while dealing with heightened demand for your services.

One of Harding's responses to this conundrum has been to create a new chief of staff role – filled last January by Sue Brooks (pictured), a non-lawyer with a background in process sue-brooksmanagement that was honed at Barclaycard. Another was the introduction of e-billing, in order to more closely monitor legal expenditure, during last summer's biannual review of the bank's extensive panel of external legal advisers.

"Taking place when it did, the review also gave us a chance to assess firms on criteria such as the ability to provide good governance and risk management," continues Harding. "But really I see the changes more in the context of my continuing responsibility to raise the performance of the legal team as I've been required to do by my chief executive since joining Barclays [in 2003 from Clifford Chance (CC)]. That's very much the culture of the organisation."

After three-quarters of an hour in the company of the legal executive committee's seven members, it is obvious where Harding is coming from. This isn't the place for refugees from private practice craving some work/life balance.

Life has been anything but relaxed for Barclays' legal team in recent years. "I caught up with an associate we had in from a major law firm as maternity leave cover who, having returned to her firm, was joking about how slowly everyone there seemed to move. Barclays is very fast-paced," recalls Duncan Perry, Barclays general counsel for wealth.

Barclaycard general counsel Mark Edwards adds: "The dynamism and regular organisational change you get in a bank the size of Barclays requires constant thought and action from its in-house lawyers, making life here very intense – more so than at a City law firm, I'd argue."

In this highly-commercial environment, "pro-activity", "excellent social skills" and an ability "to sell your ideas" are prerequisites, agree Harding, Perry, Edwards and the remaining members of the team: deputy general counsel Michael Shaw, Barclays Capital (BarCap) general counsel Jonathan Hughes, global retail and commercial banking general counsel Judith Shepherd and emerging markets general counsel William Lewis.

The technical legal aspects of the job remain as challenging as in private practice, though, insists Harding: "Being in-house at a bank is a bit different, mainly because most of what we do as a bank is underpinned by contract law – we're not selling widgets, we're selling loans and money – so there's always a very high legal content."

Then, of course, there is the fact that your employer's capacity to generate vast amounts of high-end legal work means virtually every top law firm wants to be your friend. Barclays has long been one of the most coveted legal clients in the UK – that status has, if anything, grown with the bank's recent expansion and relative rise of its status in a much-changed hierarchy of banking institutions.

One recent manifestation of this dynamic has been law firms' loaning of increasingly large numbers of secondees in order to help Barclays and its competitor banks deal with the greater workloads they've been facing (see box). But it is also evident on other levels: this day-long meeting, for example, was hosted by Allen & Overy at its Canary Wharf offices, complete with an associated networking lunch.

Maybe it is a reflection of the huge clout of Barclays' legal team that when the conversation moves onto billing methods, the views expressed conspicuously fail to correspond to the standard 'hourly rates: bad; fixed fees: good' line voiced by many in-house counsel.

Fixed-fee arrangements are, says Shepherd, to nods of approval from the rest of the group, "just one of a number of levers you can pull to manage costs". She continues: "For us, what's more important is for law firms to think imaginatively about how we can package things up in a way for them to deliver their services at a lower cost."

There is also much talk of the importance of "getting close to the business" in order to influence behaviour in a way that prevents costly external legal instructions further down the line; "nipping potential problems in the bud", as Shepherd puts it. Fully utilising the team is another popular theme – not surprising, given that Barclays' legal function is the size of a UK top 20 law firm.

The team's responses are similarly nuanced on the topic of 2009 legal buzzword, 'outsourcing' (nothing new, of course, to banks, many of which have been sending commoditised work overseas for some time now). "It's one of a range of options, but while we're involved in a handful of arrangements with law firms that then outsource elements of the work on a matter, we don't do any directly," says Perry. "Often there are other better value options. For example, on a recent litigation we hired our own temporary paralegals for nine to 12 months, who were able to work very closely with the team from CC who were handling the case, providing excellent value."

All very impressive, but isn't the culture of continual self-improvement and constant pressure to stay one step ahead of the game a touch stressful at times? "To some extent, I suppose," responds Harding politely, sounding slightly mystified. "But when you get to work with great people and enjoy what you're doing, you don't feel the stress."

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The view from the wharf – Barclays on:

Secondees

Though there have been persistent claims that some in-house teams at banks have made excessive demands for secondees from law firms, Barclays' global retail and commercial banking general counsel Judith Shepherd and deputy general counsel Michael Shaw argue Barclays is at pains to strike a proper balance.

"We're careful tomonitor the level of secondees we have at any one time against our permanent headcount because clearly there's a point at which too many of them becomes unacceptable froma risk management point of view," explains Shepherd. "We also insist that all secondees report to permanent staff; you can't have pockets of four secondees all reporting to each other when a transaction is going on."

mark-hardingShaw adds: "My experience has been that firms are very keen
to give us secondees because of the benefits they bring in helping to build relationships and cement knowledge of howour business works."

Law firm loyalty

While relationships between banks and law firms have become more commercial over the last decade, the Barclays legal executive team concedes to not being "enamoured" when one of its firms acts for a hedge fund. "But in a market that's far more complex than even a decade ago, we will review each case in turn and acknowledge that, on occasion, some cases of conflicts are inevitable," says Barclays emerging markets general counsel William Lewis.

"Another thing altogether, though, would be one of our key law firms actually acting against Barclays," he adds. Mark Harding (pictured above) puts it another way: "I want law firms to be passionate about our success."

Training contracts

The bank's investment banking business Barclays Capital's first-ever legal graduate trainees successfully completed their training contracts last autumn, with all five – who undertook four six-month rotations among teams within BarCap's London finance and business departments – being retained by the investment bank.

"We're the only area of Barclays that offers training contracts at the moment, and it's obviously not an altruistic exercise," says BarCap general counsel Jonathan Hughes. "Quite simply, it's a response to a demand for top-level people who know at an early stage how the investment bank works. And happily, we've managed to attract some very high-quality people who have now qualified not just in Law Society terms, but as fully-fledged members of the BarCap legal function." There are no current plans to take trainees in the rest of the organisation, although trainees from panel firms are regularly seconded to Barclays as one of their training seats.