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Established in the North West of England in 1908, Nichols plc is an international soft drinks business best known for producing Vimto. It now also sells and markets other familiar brands across the UK including Feel Good, Levi Roots and Sunkist.
Internationally, Vimto retails in 85 countries, where it is produced locally in more than 29 countries by authorised licensees.
The ‘Out of Home’ division of Nichols caters for companies operating within the leisure, catering and hospitality sectors offering a range of frozen, post-mix and soft drinks teamed with technical support, customer service and national distribution.
Licensing the Vimto brand, the company also works with some of the UK’s leading sweet manufactures delivering Vimto-flavoured confectionery including bon bons, lollipops, jelly beans, jellies, ice lollies and even lip balm.
Newly appointed as CFO of Nichols, David Rattigan was keen to establish a robust company structure that would support growth. To achieve this, he wanted to bring the Company Secretary functions into the legal team and assess in depth what needed to be put in place to facilitate positive change. Aware that some legal work was being outsourced and that the service had not been getting great feedback internally, he nevertheless wanted to avoid rushing into
a solution that wouldn’t work in the long term. Instead, he wanted the perspectives of the board and wider team to bring everyone together around a strategy that within six to nine months they could begin to implement.
Therefore, he needed to buy himself some time and key to this was getting the right legal support in place. As an additional challenge, he also found himself in the position of needing some immediate legal support after personnel changes in the department left him with no internal legal resource.
In his words: “I needed to lean on a professional team to keep the day job running and keep those relationships going both internally and externally but also to help me shape what we needed in the long term. I wanted someone on board who wouldn’t drop the ball in the short term but would offer sensible, intelligent input to help reach the ultimate goal of a robust in-house legal function fit for a business of Nichols’ size and expansion plans.”
As he was new to the company, David wanted to start with a
clean sheet and he consequently prioritised a review of the legal provision at Nichols. Unsure of what the ideal internal / external balance should be, he was looking for impartial input to help him get to where he wanted to be: “Some of the challenges we were facing operationally were because our contracts weren’t robust enough – not that they weren’t legally sound – more that they didn’t have enough edge to them, enough bite to them.” To position the company competitively, a different perspective was required and David realised that, for this to happen, he could not just rely on inherited systems and procedures.
David approached The Legal Director having heard about them from Nichols’ CEO Marnie Millard. (Marnie and The Legal Director’s Kirstie Penk had met on a Women In Law UK speaking panel the previous year.) The Legal Director’s business model of embedding a senior lawyer in your team on a flexible or part-time basis appealed enormously to David who, like many, was unaware that such a solution existed and he was happy to proceed with the recommendation. Kirstie quickly identified lawyer Sarah Caddy as perfect for the job and a meeting was arranged.
Sarah was initially engaged for eight days a month for a six-month period to provide Nichols with legal support. Given that the previous employee left, however, this instantly turned into five days a week. Her remit was to carry out a legal audit of the various areas of the business, to review the business’s key legal agreements and to consider how the company would best be served by legal support in the future.
As David said, Sarah “over delivered” on this. She came in and handled the day job and the immediate situation “no problem”, dealing with the many ongoing commercial contracts. She also did a high-level scan to see what required looking into in more detail and identified the company’s policies on the website and internally as an area needing attention. On further examination, having “dug deeper and kicked the tires a bit”, this led to a big compliance review, which Sarah then went on to manage.
Having established what legal services were required in the long term, Sarah helped shape the job description for a permanent employee to perform the legal work for Nichols in-house. The flexibility of The Legal Director’s service provision has enabled Sarah to offer continuing support by helping the new employee with the induction and handover of work. And to guarantee continuation of service and assist the incoming lawyer, Sarah even provided a plan identifying upcoming work that they would need to undertake once they arrived.
From the outset, David benefitted from Sarah’s professionalism and expertise. Describing her as “a real self-starter”, her work ethic and accurate understanding of the situation not only relieved some of the immediate workload but also inspired confidence going forward: “It was a relief to know there was somebody I could trust to work alongside me, take some of the burden off me but also, once we were out the other side of the initial challenge, really help me to get the right answer for the future.”
Practically, Sarah benefitted Nichols in numerous ways. In the process of reviewing some contracts relating to acquisitions Nichols had done, she highlighted some areas of risk, enabling them to close the gap and rectify the situation.
The Legal Director’s model of supplying senior legal consultants on a flexible basis has paid dividends for Nichols. David marvels at what Sarah has achieved and welcomes the insight and energy which she has put into her work.
The Legal Director is a fully regulated legal consultancy that provides businesses with high-calibre experienced lawyers on a part-time or flexible basis. By working smarter as part of the client’s business, and by delivering legal advice from a business perspective, we can demonstrably save our clients significant amounts of money and directors’ time. The Legal Director is the most transparent, cost-effective way of embedding a senior lawyer within your business — at a fraction of the cost of employing a full-time Legal Director or engaging with a traditional law firm on an ad hoc basis. We match one of our lawyers to your business needs and he/she then performs as a member of your senior management team, just like an in-house lawyer. Moreover, clients can use our unique 9-point legal framework for business-focused legal advice to systematically address key business areas that require legal expertise and appropriate action.
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