Sapna Bedi FitzGerald
Membership
Under the old system, all in-house solicitors who belonged to the Law Society automatically became members of the old-style C&I Group. As a result, shortly before the C&I Group and the Law Society formally split, the C&I Group comprised around 8,000 individual members.
When the split between the Law Society and the C&I Group was finalised, automatic cross-membership of the two organisations ceased. As a result, the UA part of the C&I Group has had to rebuild its entire membership from scratch. Today, its membership – which is free to join, and lasts as long as a lawyer remains in practice – stands at around 4,500. A smaller number of in-house lawyers also subscribe to trading part of the C&I Group, at a cost of ?40 plus VAT per year. Today, CIGST has around 2,500 subscribers, who receive additional member benefits over and above those provided by the UA.
Today, the scope of legal professionals who can join the UA and the CIGST is slightly different in each case. Both groups require that their members must work in commerce and industry. For that reason, private practice solicitors are excluded. However, while UA membership is confined to solicitors working in England and Wales, membership of the CIGST is much broader. The general rule for CIGST membership is that the applicant must be working as a lawyer within an organisation. This means that members can include not only solicitors, but also barristers, company secretaries, legal clerks, legal executives, and paralegals. Lawyers working in local government are also free to join, although they tend to belong to their own professional association, the Local Government Group. As an organisation, the C&I Group has recently established a separate sub-group for lawyers working in the charities sector. It is also investigating the possibly of doing something similar for lawyers working in the armed forces.
Current Leadership
There is a substantial overlap between the 13-member board of directors of the trading CIGST, and the representative leadership of the 10-member UA committee. In a typical year, around 75 per cent of the members of both entities will be the same people.
The current leader of both the representative UA and the trading CIGST is Sapna Bedi FitzGerald, company secretary and head of legal at LSL Property Services plc.
External links
Domestically, the C&I Group has close connections with the two main associations for barristers in England and Wales, and also with the Scottish In-House Lawyers Group, the in-house committee of the Law Society of Scotland. Within Europe, the C&I Group is a member of ECLA, the European Company Lawyers Association. Further afield, it is currently exploring the possibility of a formal association with ACLA, the Australian Corporate Lawyers Association.
Member Benefits
Each year, the C&I Group training committee arranges around 55 days of one-day training events in London. Each of these events are worth five hours of continuous professional development (CPD) training – almost one third of English lawyers’ 16-hour mandatory requirement. And, although membership of the C&I Group costs just ?40 per year, members receive a ?90 discount for admission to each event.
In addition to the London-based training events, each of the association’s seven regional groups will typically organise between three and four regional training events per year. Nationally, the organisation is also in the process of rolling out shorter online training modules, which will each receive one hours’ worth of CPD in their own right. For those in-house lawyers interested in corporate governance, the C&I Group’s Governance Committee has also produced numerous guides and best practice on the subject.
Besides its educational programme, the C&I Group organises numerous social events throughout the year, including three annual dinners in London, Manchester and Leeds. The London region recently organised a “speed networking” event, to allow corporate counsel to get to know their own peer group in a social setting. The Group also offers substantial discounts on publications produced by the English Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators, and also low-cost hotel rates for members who travel.
Current hot topics
The past few months have seen the commencement of three separate reviews concerning the regulation of legal services in England & Wales. Two reviews, conducted by Nick Smedley and Lord Hunt of the Wirral, were commissioned by the Law Society of England & Wales. The Law Society is the representative arm of the English and Welsh solicitors’ profession, and also the approved body under the recently introduced Legal Services Act. The third is being commissioned by the Legal Services Board, the body appointed under the Legal Services Act to regulate legal services. This review is examining issues surrounding regulatory independence for lawyers.
Although the C&I Group only has two seats on the Law Society’s council, the C&I’s new chair, Sapna Bedi FitzGerald, is happy that the group’s opinions are being listened to. “We continue to have a good dialogue with both the Law Society and the SRA,” she says.
Most recently, the C&I Group successfully lobbied the SRA against changes to solicitors’ code of conduct, which substantially increased the administration costs of many in-house legal departments. Before the SRA took up its regulatory function in England and Wales – and introduced a new code of conduct for solicitors in the process – in-house lawyers only required a practising certificate to perform certain functions, rather than to offer legal advice. As a result, it had been commonplace for many in-house departments to only purchase one practicing certificate for one member of their team, even if the department employed more than one lawyer. Once the SRA introduced its new version of the code, it became very unclear as to when a certificate was now required for every single qualified solicitor – at a cost of almost ?1,000 per person, per year. With many in-house lawyers already questioning the benefits of retaining their practicing certificates at all, this was an unwelcome, and expensive, development. Following representations from the C&I Group, the SRA recently amended the code, to revert to the original situation.
Going forward, C&I Group chair Sapna Bedi FitzGerald would also like to see the Solicitors’ Code of Conduct reformed in a way that reflects how in-house lawyers purchase legal services in the 21st century. For example, Mrs FitzGerald would like to see a review of the conflict of interests rules. In general, she says she would welcome a new regime, where clients are free to make informed choices about whether or not to allow firms to act for them in a potential conflict situation. She would also like to see the rule that requires law firms to provide in-house lawyers with detailed “client care” letters at the start of every matter amended, so the client can agree to waive this requirement. While this requirement may be useful for occasional domestic consumers of legal services, it is also a low-level irritant for both sophisticated law firms and their clients.
Beyond issues of regulatory reforms, Mrs FitzGerald says the C&I is currently working on a new “best practice” guidance note for their members on how to deal with changing market conditions. It is anticipated that this note will address the possible impact of “TUPE” (Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment)) rules when a corporate client changes its external legal advisers. Through a quirk of employment law, in-house legal departments who switch law firms may now find the lawyers who works for the recently dismissed firm are automatically transferred to the firm who replaced them. While this law is most often used to protect the rights of low-paid workers when their roles are put out to tender, many in-house lawyers may not appreciate that these same employment rights could also apply to well-paid professional legal advisors. “Some in-house lawyers may wish to review and amend their terms of business with law firms, to minimise the risk of them being affected by these changes,” Mrs FitzGerald says.
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