Peter Kennerley is the company secretary and general counsel at Scottish & Newcastle, the international brewing company. Based in the company headquarters in Edinburgh, Kennerley presides over a team of 25 lawyers and a couple of paralegals. The head-count is spread around Western Europe with seven people in the UK, eight in France, 12 in Belgium and one in Portugal, reflecting the different legal needs of the brands and the different legal structures in those countries.
In structural terms, the UK lawyers report directly to Kennerley and the European lawyers report directly to their businesses locally with a dotted line to Kennerley in Edinburgh on legal matters. There are no separate compliance staff and numbers have been pretty steady during Kennerley’s five years at the group – they have only increased the headcount by one and that was for an employment paralegal. In the UK the lawyers are based centrally, but Kennerley is looking at embedding them into different business units.
