Zoopla Legal Team

This included basic things like reviewing supply contracts and insurance policies, and making sure we were close to the management team on key decision points. But we were also aware of the need to help the business – business continuity in practice meant we had to make sure that sales teams had our input for major projects and access to key customer contracts that had been negotiated during the first lockdown. Looking for a [paralegal] to support the busy legal department and help us meet it is our responsibility to ensure that every Zoopligan feels safe and supported with all legal and regulatory needs. Our team takes care of everything from compliance to protecting our employees and users. We supported our sales teams during free hours for our agent customers, which required a lot of effort in the design and subsequent implementation. It was a huge team effort between the legal and commercial teams to get everyone to sign the new terms. In 2018, Thirdfort was part of Mishcon`s MDR LAB, an incubator program for startups operating in the legal field. My initial focus and that of the team was on what we could do to ensure business stability and prudent risk management at what seemed like a fairly unpredictable time. The pandemic was a key issue, which meant looking at things from a different perspective. We`re pretty generalist as a team and we`re used to turning to things that have nothing to do with our respective backgrounds as lawyers, but over the past year it seems like everything has come from crazy angles and in crazy volumes and with so much complexity.

The team`s workforce grew from 12 to 54 people between January 2020 and February 2021 due to the pandemic, and is being used to remotely onboard more than 30,000 clients each month for more than 500 law firms and real estate companies (a tenfold increase from pre-pandemic numbers). Amelia Guilfoyle is General Counsel at Zoopla. This is a chapter of our eBook “GCs & the pandemic: how legal responded”. We found that the world stood still for a short time at the beginning of the pandemic – but it continued, and we still had a lot of in-depth general questions that a legal department has to deal with every day. But it seemed to be a much higher volume, with even faster turnaround times – something I hadn`t thought possible. In February, we were hearing more and more about the coronavirus, and then I remember wondering in March if it was safe to hug or shake hands. We discussed it one week at a team dinner, and the next week the lockdown was in place. This year, we want to make sure we`re empowering the business more than ever, rather than delaying it, by giving them self-service tools so they don`t have to come to us every time – and by giving us the ability to manage risk more strategically. I`m so proud of our team in terms of the firepower we`ve delivered, but where I want us to be next year is a proactive team that looks at overall strategy, never blocks and always gets business done. Chesterman`s estimated net worth is £360 million and in 2013 he was named Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young. He said, “My passion in business is problem solving, and the Thirdfort team has developed a product that tackles a problem that affects hundreds of thousands of us every year – the tedious process of buying and selling homes.” Yet it is not uncommon for a legal department to be involved in these issues at an early stage. Contracts and the law affect everything in a business; From leases and insurance to employment law, commercial issues, suppliers, security, loans, everything has a legal element.

What was unprecedented was the volume of tasks, the time scales and the context of a rather uncertain world. This strong liquidity injection brings the legal tech start-up`s total funds to £4.2 million. Our business law team advised Zoopla on a number of legal issues and helped them find pragmatic and commercial solutions. Amelia Guilfoyle, General Counsel at Zoopla, said of the relationship with Harper James: “Harper James is a perfect fit for Zoopla as we share this ambitious mentality. The on-demand service we receive from Harper James allows us to combine their expertise with that of our own in-house counsel. This means we can receive legal advice quickly and confidently from specialists in any area of law, when and when we need it. There are no hidden extras and the service we have received has always shown that we are aware of our fast business requirements. This is a team we go to with our heads and hearts.

It`s all about expertise and empathy. We fully support our employees. It means thinking logically and communicating clearly – and precisely. We are here to provide people with the information they need to succeed, and we are very proud of that. We balance speed and care, stay curious and open, and always pay close attention to detail. We are less interested in costumes and more in being friendly, approachable and empowering. If this sounds like the kind of place you might belong to, we`d love to meet you. Data Protection Officer); Legal and Compliance Collaboration and Assistance One of the consequences of the past year has been the involvement of the legal department in many more teams and many new employees – due to the increase in volume and variety of topics. The visibility of the legal department and our relationships with the company`s employees have improved significantly.

The funds will be used to support the expansion of the digital ID and anti-money laundering application in the legal and real estate sectors, particularly in light of the digital identification standard recently launched by HM Land Registry. The next big task for us, once the dust settled a bit, was to help our sales team make free offers to our agents to help them get through the lockdown on a fairly large scale. This equated to a £30m investment in our agent partners and was therefore definitely a cross-team effort. Chesterman continued, “This hasn`t changed in decades and is ripe for transformation, particularly when it comes to compliance aspects that affect not only consumers and their lawyers, but also agents, brokers and lenders.