Hannah Hullah is director, legal at the John Lewis Partnership, the parent company of John Lewis & Partners and Waitrose & Partners. The partnership has more than 80,000 employees worldwide and more than £10 billion in revenues.
Reporting to partnership secretary Michael Herlihy, Hullah directs a legal team of 16 lawyers and two paralegals. The company currently has a four-strong legal panel of regular advisers, comprising Burges Salmon, Dentons, Eversheds Sutherland and Slaughter and May, which will be reviewed later this year.
How do you work with external legal advisers?
We have a panel that we put in place nearly four years ago now. We very rarely go off our panel when it comes to giving work to law firms.
When we appointed our last panel, our main criteria were looking for a one-stop-shop relationship, and for law firms that aligned with our culture. For our next panel review, we'll be focusing on innovation and how law firms provide their services to us, as well as value for money.
In-house teams need to make sure they're doing the work in the most cost-effective way for the company. We want to get the best bang for our buck.
What is your approach to the billable hour?
We very rarely pay by the hour. It does happen from time to time, but mainly not. Five or six years ago we were already using menu pricing much more. But what we're looking at now most of the time is annual fees – choosing one firm and setting a price for the year, and then eating as much as we like over the year. Some years we might win, some years they might win.
The way we look at it, if they get a foot in the door by offering us a yearly rate to manage cost-effectively for business-as-usual, then for non-business-as-usual pieces of work, they're well positioned to then get their money back by winning those mandates.
How can you encourage diversity in law firms?
When we're doing panel interviews, we do look for diversity. We want people to reach their full potential, and panel firms to allow them to do this. I suspect eyebrows would be raised if a law firm turned up to a pitch with a team of white middle-class men.
It's also about how partners treat the junior members of their team – for example, whether they let them speak during the pitch or let them do more than just take notes in the meeting room.
"Eyebrows would be raised if a law firm turned up to a pitch with a team of white middle class men"
What's new in the John Lewis Partnership in-house team?
We've been building a new leadership team for the legal department. While the John Lewis Partnership has always had one legal team, previously we were split to handle John Lewis on one side and Waitrose on the other. Now there's less of a split between whether it's work for John Lewis or Waitrose, and more on which aspect of law it is dealing with.
This follows [former John Lewis Partnership legal head] Keith Hubber's departure last year. As part of this, we have hired a few new lawyers and are currently in the hiring process for a new role – head of regulatory.
How do you approach the struggling retail market?
With everything going on with the high street, we have to ask ourselves: is this a complete apocalypse or is this a reinvention of how the high street works?
If you approach it as the latter, then within our teams we are reinventing and changing what we do and how we work.
What we need to do during this turbulence is look at how best to do risk management and compliance. We also need to make sure our external panel firms are being properly embedded into our work.
Is this a complete apocalypse or is this a reinvention of how the high street works?
How is the use of legal tech evolving in your team?
We're using more technology than we ever have done in the past. And what we're looking for in terms of panel firms is a similar adoption of tech to improve value and efficiency. Some law firms are ahead of the curve, while others are falling behind. There are also now so many other advisers out there who we can turn to if they are ahead of the game in this sense.
In terms of the firms we have on our panel, they're doing well in terms of innovation. It's not necessarily about size, but about being willing to experiment with different techniques.
How do you expect in-house departments to change?
From the perspective of John Lewis partnership and also other businesses, in-house legal teams should be moving far more away from transactional lawyers who sit alongside the business, and towards legal partnerships who work within the business.
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Hannah Hullah, John Lewis Partnership
