Sony Ericsson GC Jonathan Pearl tells Alex Aldridge why he gets a buzz out of working in business and why he learned to delegate

Last year was not good for Sony Ericsson. The troubled mobile phone manufacturer found itself recording a $1.1bn (£730m) loss as the recession saw handset sales plummet and competitor products, such as Apple's iPhone, dominate what was left of the market. During the last 18 months the company has cut over 2,000 jobs, including 10 in its legal department. "Although I am very confident about our future, we're very much in protect and survive mode at the moment," admits Sony Ericsson general counsel and company secretary Jonathan Pearl.

And he thinks 2010 will be tough, too: "While I don't expect to lose people this year, I do expect a lot of scrutiny on our costs and efficiency – although the legal budget should remain at its current figure."

A large proportion of the €26m-€27m (£23.5m-£24.4m) Sony is expecting to spend this year on outside counsel goes on defending patent litigation cases in the US – an unavoidable hazard of developing new products in a heavily trademarked industry. Pearl has succeeded in trimming costs in this area by breaking up the work and sending more commoditised tasks to smaller law firms. He comments: "It makes sense to have the heavy lifting done as cost-efficiently as possible."

He has also been pushing hard for value-based billing agreements among Sony Ericsson's regular legal advisers, the majority of which are firms in the US, including K&L Gates and Paul Hastings Janofsky & Walker. Baker & McKenzie and Eversheds are the outfits most regularly instructed in the UK. However, Pearl concedes that where the litigation approaches a 'bet the company' level of seriousness, it becomes near-impossible to work with law firms on anything other than an hourly rate. "For the really major stuff, it would be bonkers to choose the second-rate firm that is offering to charge per job in favour of the top firm that is insisting on billing by the hour," he adds.

At the same time, Pearl has been ensuring that things run as tightly as possible internally – hence his decision to bring in Paul Gilbert of LBC Wise Counsel, the in-house lawyer consultancy, who will start work with the Sony Ericsson legal team in the coming months. "While we're already pretty efficient, doing much of the legal work generated by the company ourselves, there is always room for improvement," Pearl says. "Getting a view from outside should help us do this."

You get the impression that Pearl would make a pretty good consultant himself. Management is particularly important to him. It is why he left private practice: "I realised fairly early on into my time at Bates Wells & Braithwaite that life at a law firm wasn't for me; I value legal skills but I wanted to be involved in business, working with people." And it is why he joined Sony from his first in-house position at Apple: "Apple was exciting and had a fantastic atmosphere, but I wanted to manage people, and the opportunity came up at Sony to head up a small team," he comments.

At first, though, management proved more difficult than he thought: "You think managing people will be easy if you're a nice guy. But actually it's probably harder that way, certainly tougher than I expected." But through a philosophy of honesty and "refusing to react when buttons are being pushed that affect your ego", he has now got it down to a point where he is so trusting of those working under him that he is happy to admit to "knowing no law anymore". He continues: "I just know people who know things – and let them get on with doing what they're good at. At the end of the day, I can't do their jobs half as well as they can."

Such an approach is essential for Pearl to keep track of the bigger picture affecting his 67-strong legal team, based in London, Lund, Munich, Singapore, Beijing, Tokyo and at various locations in the US. Overseeing them means a gruelling schedule of travel that sees Pearl on the road three weeks out of every four. "I'm so used to being jet-lagged that's it's almost become the norm. But it's worth it – you can't manage people via teleconference," he says.

Pearl's twin role as company secretary, which sees him involved in board-level discussions between parent companies Sony and Ericsson, also demands a fair amount of his attention. "One of the reasons why the joint venture [founded in 2001] has been so successful and long-lasting is that it is based on quite a thin agreement, meaning there's a lot of dialogue between the two parents about how to get the best out of it," he says, adding that this is probably the aspect of the job he finds most interesting. "It's fascinating to be around amazing business people like Howard Stringer, chairman and CEO of Sony, and Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg," he continues. "You never know which directions these discussions are going to go in."

Currently Sony Ericsson is building its comeback on a greater push in the US, the world's most lucrative mobile phone market, where it has never been a major player. From his position within the company's inner circle, Pearl is readying his team to play a supporting role.

Career timeline

1985: Graduates from Warwick University
1988: Joins Bates Wells & Braithwaite as a trainee
1990: Moves to Apple UK as legal counsel
1993: Joins Sony Electronics Europe as chief counsel
2005: Becomes general counsel and company secretary for Sony Ericsson