Hayley Griffin, Consultant

"Missguided have been a client for about 5 years now. They found themselves in a situation where they needed a Head of Legal to run their department. It’s a really unique situation for a law firm to place somebody in-house whilst still keeping them in private practice as well. I had a dual role; I was a litigator at Brandsmiths and a full time commercial lawyer at Missguided. The benefits to Missguided of having someone from Brandsmiths actually in their business with them are that they have a legal expert on hand just outside their office that they can go and speak to. They don’t have to source the queries that they have through different channels, the business is open plan. So you have every single different department all within one building at the HQ that can reach you at the desk – that’s a huge benefit to the business. It stops email instructions, telephone queries where they won’t need to be any. It can be a little bit of a pullback for the person that’s placed there as a lawyer - I had queues of people at my desk at one point.

Missguided had their trusted advisors under their roof with them. That gave them some comfort in a time when they didn’t have a Head of Department. They were of course looking for it externally, but whilst that gap was there they knew their legal department was taken care of because of who was running it at that point."