Winner: Avanade The six shortlisted commercial teams in this category have all won strong praise from their business colleagues and the respect of their outside counsel. Commercial teams are often involved in preventive work, or they are called in to sort out a major problem such as when their company faces a legal challenge or regulatory investigation.
Pfizer’s eight-lawyer UK legal team recently grabbed with both hands the opportunity to play a crucial role in a major project for their company – its groundbreaking initiative to break away from the traditional wholesale method of distributing prescriptive medicines by supplying them directly to pharmacies. Team members worked closely with the business pre- and post-launch advising on contractual arrangements and operational detail, winning praise from one senior executive for their “professional expertise, single-minded commitment, good humour and sheer hard graft”. VT Group’s legal team, led by Matthew Jowett, has also played a central role in the company’s strategic development, by masterminding a succession of private finance initiative deals and joint ventures. Going to court can be time-consuming and traumatic and is often best avoided. But victory, if it does come, can be sweet. In June, National Grid’s team of in-house and external advisers, under the watchful eye of general counsel Helen Mahy, persuaded the House of Lords to overturn a High Court ruling that it should clean up a former gas works site that it had never owned.
