Colt delivers in-house legal team innovation

In general, the legal department isn’t always associated with innovative ways of providing services, but here at Colt, we’ve taken a good, hard look at how we provide those services to our business for our internal and external customers, to enable the business and support our company’s growth. Any initiatives we have taken over the last few months support this, and it’s great to receive positive feedback from the wider industry about those. Indeed our in-house legal team was shortlisted for the prestigious awards within the legal industry from the FT. I have received many positive comments from my peers during the ceremony and our achievements were highlighted in the FT report.

Some of our key initiatives have been:

Colt’s legal practice embedded in our business agenda
Europe’s fragmented legal and regulatory landscape plays to Colt’s strength. And with Colt’s expertise in delivering IT and network infrastructure and services across many European countries, comes associated knowledge in dealing with local and country legal and regulatory landscapes, especially around the growing cloud computing offerings. Our legal team are working with business to develop new services and the commercials needed to support them.

Working across geographies
We have also transformed Colt’s legal team with an SLA-based legal services model, with colleagues in our India Shared Services Centre supporting our European operations. The creation of the Shared Service Legal team has significantly strengthened the legal function and is strongly aligned with our business objectives- be they revenue enhancement, the development of new business models, the use of technology for processes institutionalisation or efficient cost management. The team in India runs most of our operations support needs, and up to 30% of all legal work, for example providing a data protection help desk for first line support for issues across our EU markets. This supports the efficiency of our team in our European geographies tremendously.

A new way of working with legal firms Moving from multiple providers across Europe to a single preferred supplier has not only given us certainty of cost around many of the legal services we offer, with fixed rate services, it has also allowed for a stronger partnership and visibility into the business for our primary advisors, Baker & McKenzie. They have a depth of knowledge about our business, while we can obtain legal advice in any of our jurisdictions at short notice through this network. With more than 13 countries to cover, this access and support is invaluable. This innovation on our collaboration led Baker & McKenzie to win the FT award for the most innovative firm in client service, and I had the privilege to receive a note from Gary Senior, Baker & McKenzie’s London Managing Partner, which I’m proud to share with you: “Our win is really the win of our joint teams. This arrangement is only really possible because our teams work together to make it work. We also think that your own innovation and vision laid the platform for us to create something special with Colt. We very much value the relationship and all that working with you and your team has brought to ours.”