Inside Life: Catherine Hasler, Waitrose

Catherine Hasler studied law at Oxford University before doing an LLM at Cambridge. After a brief stint as an MP's research assistant, she completed a training contract with Slaughter and May, qualifying into its tax team in 2005. Tax law, Hasler insists, is not boring but a "great intellectual challenge and a key part of doing business".

Since then she has worked in-house for three very different companies.

The team at Slaughters, she says, was full of brilliant people and, had she not seen the advertisement for the job as legal counsel at the world famous Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, she might very well have never wanted to leave. "I saw this job and I applied for it, thinking that I'd never get it, but that if I did, it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to get the role running the legal ship at an amazing place."

Hasler was initially the sole legal counsel at Kew. While people are familiar with the botanical gardens, the scientific and conservation work done by Kew is less well known. When she joined, the organisation was facing challenges including a difficult funding environment and learning to operate on a more commercial basis, which included making better use of its intellectual property (IP). "The role was very broad and completely different from Slaughter and May. It was a significant change for me".

As well as being legal counsel, Hasler's role encompassed head of governance and Freedom of Information (FOI) officer, as the FOI Act had recently been implemented. Recalling her time there, Hasler says: "It was a really special job and I felt privileged to do it. It was great to feel part of an organisation that was doing so much good".

After four years, Hasler moved to become legal counsel at Korean electronics company Samsung. She worked in its European HQ in London in a small team initially comprising the general counsel, one other lawyer and her. Samsung, she notes, was going through "an interesting period in its evolution. It had developed fantastic market-leading products, especially TVs and smartphones, in a market that was changing at lightning speed."

In 2014, she switched sectors again and became a senior lawyer within the John Lewis Partnership. When she joined, the in-house team worked across both the John Lewis and Waitrose brands but the incoming general counsel, who joined last year, restructured the team so that the commercial lawyers were aligned to either John Lewis or Waitrose. Hasler was appointed head of legal for the Waitrose arm. The John Lewis Partnership also has an employment legal team and a property & planning legal team.

"Both businesses are huge and have significant differences. Having separate teams enabled us to get closer to the separate businesses, embedding us with them and improving our effectiveness," observes Hasler. She recruited a small team with two commercial lawyers, who are responsible for all commercial, contractual, regulatory, competition and IP issues, "together with a host of other elements that arise".

Following a review last year, the John Lewis Partnership reduced the number of firms retained on its external legal panel to four. Slaughter and May does its corporate work, while Dentons, Eversheds and Burges Salmon cover other areas of work.

"Quality food, honestly priced" used to be the strapline, intoned by actress Jenny Seagrove in the Waitrose television adverts, and that is the approach that the business takes to instructing external law firms. "The key is doing the right work at the right price. We don't always need a gold standard, but the most effective solution, delivered by the right lawyers. Firms need to understand the nature of the work and what a good outcome looks like".

With limited internal resource, Hasler explains, the in-house team focuses on dealing with issues where knowledge of Waitrose is critical. But where panel firms are engaged, Hasler wants them to focus on the areas of highest risk and most strategic importance, rather than spending lengthy periods on the more boilerplate work. She also stresses the importance of building relationships with external firms and having an open dialogue to ensure they understand what is required of them.

Looking back over the challenges of shifting to an in-house role, Hasler points to the enormous variety of the advice sought. "When I first went in-house, people thought I knew every single aspect of the law". That, she states, was far from the reality but she was very good at learning new things quickly. For example, at Kew, she had to pick up FOI issues and after joining Waitrose, she had to get to grips with the Grocery Code.

In addition, she says, you have to adapt your communication style to whom you are advising and gauge how to present your advice and in what level of detail. "Sometimes the business just needs to know if something is fine to do or not, and at other times, it needs greater analysis".

As well as the variety of work, a big plus of working in-house, says Hasler, is the range of people that you deal with. "You have a much narrower client base in private practice. For instance, at Kew I got to work with world-leading scientists who were doing incredible work". The key to success, she says, lies in "a mix of providing information quickly, rolling your sleeves up and being brave".