Thomson vocal

A year on from the merger between the Thomson Corporation and Reuters - which created the world's largest information multimedia news agency - and there has still been no review of the new company's fused panel of UK legal advisers. And according to Daragh Fagan, Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) general counsel (GC) for Thomson Reuters Markets division, there are no plans for one.

"We inherited some good relationships with UK law firms - predominantly from Reuters as Thomson Financial was a smaller business in the UK - so we thought, 'why not keep them?'" he says.

Ashurst, Allen & Overy, Clifford Chance, Burges Salmon, Kemp Little, Mayer Brown and Slaughter and May make up the company's roster of UK firms, with an additional group of local outfits instructed on matters across the EMEA region. Among the list of City firms, Bristol-based Burges Salmon stands out. What is it like working with a firm outside London?

"Easy," responds Fagan. "They'll just hop on a train when necessary, but the reality is that most things are done by email and on the phone anyway, so I don't tend to meet physically with any of the lawyers we instruct that much. And regional firms have a different cost base, so their rates are lower."

As the recession continues, Fagan believes that going outside the capital for legal advice will become more common among large companies, although he does not see complex, multi-jurisdictional work going anywhere other than to City firms. "Clearly some of the larger outfits are going through a bit of a tough time at the moment, but the client service and level of resources they offer are fantastic," he says.

Fagan himself used to work at one of those firms - he qualified into the energy disputes team at Herbert Smith - but a life in private practice was not for him, so in 1997 he jumped ship to join the London office of Italian natural resources company Eni. "The brutal existence of partnership didn't appeal," he reflects. "And if you're working in a law firm and don't aspire to partnership, then the whole thing doesn't really work."

The move to Eni turned out well, with Fagan enjoying the day-to-day involvement in company matters - a contrast from private practice where he felt "very much the consultant, brought in to tidy up the past". During his 10 years at the company, Fagan travelled extensively, spending time in Iran, Russia and living for a six month stint in Milan while climbing the ranks to assistant general counsel. Then in 2007, he got a call from a headhunter looking to fill the Reuters EMEA GC position. Conscious that furthering his career at Eni would necessitate a full-time move to Italy - something that would have been difficult to pull off with his barrister wife and two school-age children in tow - Fagan decided to make the move to Reuters, unaware that four days later the company would announce that it had agreed terms to merge with Thomson. "I opened the paper on the Saturday after I joined and thought, 'Ah, that's going to be interesting,'" he recalls.

Integrating the two businesses after the completion of the merger in April 2008 has been a "great challenge", ushered along by the company's mantra for that period: 'One company in one year'. Within a few months of the merger, 12,000 staff had been relocated and almost 200 offices re-branded, generating plenty of legal work in the process. The most challenging element of the process, though, was creating the new dual-listed company, a task complicated by Reuters' quirky structure, which gave various trustees special voting powers in order to safeguard editorial independence. Fagan adds that with the first phase of the merger now complete, a further three years of integration have begun. As part of this, last month the company launched a new integrated customer contract for both Thomson and Reuters products.

Befitting of such an enormous organisation, the Thomson Reuters legal team is a large and complex chain of hierarchies, made up of approximately 150 staff in total and led by New York-based executive vice president (EVP) and GC Deirdre Stanley. Fagan, who reports to markets GC Nancy Gardner (also based in New York), is responsible for the 20-strong EMEA legal team, 15 of whom are lawyers. He says the position of lawyers in the company is well respected, something which he thinks may be attributable to the fact that it has an ex-lawyer, Tom Glocer, as CEO.

Life at Thomson Reuters, where the challenge is to "deliver information with as few microseconds delay as possible", is very different to Fagan's old workplace, Eni, where a typical project had a 20-year timeframe. But the senior in-house lawyer routine is not entirely dissimilar. A typical day sees Fagan get up around 7am at his Richmond home, from where he takes the train into Waterloo, followed by the Jubilee line to Canary Wharf. After grabbing a coffee in the staff canteen, he takes the lift up to the Thomson Reuters building's 10th floor. There, his days are filled with a combination of meetings and legal work coordination. "Then something will come in which completely blows my day out of the water," Fagan explains. "It might be somebody misusing the company's data, an employee matter or perhaps a bank going bust." Outside of work, Fagan enjoys running - he has completed three marathons - and reading about Russian history, something in which he first became interested while a history undergraduate at Cambridge University.

Evidently happy and settled at Thomson Reuters, Fagan's future plans revolve very much around the company. "It's been a turbulent year, internally with the merger and externally with the economy, but also very exciting," he reflects. "And now we're positioning ourselves for the growth phase, because these markets aren't going to be like this forever."

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