Oxfam's legal team works with the agency in the most difficult parts of the world, clearing the path for everything from contracts to organic farming. Jonathan Rayner reports


Delays cost lives in their line of business, which is why Oxfam’s lawyers waste no time. The charity’s emergency teams in Darfur or Bangladesh, Indonesia or Mozambique, for example, want clear and practical advice – and they cannot afford to wait for it.



The right advice, promptly given, helps make sure that food, medicine and fresh water quickly get through to where the need is most desperate, and helps ensure the survival of many thousands of vulnerable people who might otherwise die.



Oxfam is one of the world’s best-known campaigning, emergency support and development charities. It started in Oxford in 1942 to call for famine relief in Greece during the wartime blockade. Today it works in 100 countries, providing emergency help in 30 of them and funding more than 2,000 individual projects.



Beyond its headquarters in Oxford there are regional centres in Pretoria, Lima, Nairobi, New Delhi, Mexico City, Dakar and Bangkok. The charity raises funds from grants and donations, including legacies, and through its trading division, which encompasses more than 700 UK high street shops. Programme expenditure in 2006, according to its annual report, totalled $638.25 million.



The legal team’s work reflects this huge range of activity, overcoming problems and agreeing contracts with organisations and governments in some of the world’s most remote regions. Oxfam’s head of legal and company secretary Joss Saunders says that trust is all-important when rapid action is required.



‘Our colleagues on the ground want to know we’re solving the problem and getting the stuff done,’ he says. ‘They don’t expect detailed attendance notes. They want a contract turned around as fast as possible – we can often do it in just 30 minutes. The contract has got to be good enough for the purpose, no more – it doesn’t need to look pretty.’



Mr Saunders describes himself as very much a part-time partner in the Oxford offices of southern England firm Blake Lapthorn Tarlo Lyons, where he now works just one day a week, spending the rest of the week at Oxfam. But, he says, ‘the involvement with private practice keeps me commercially aware, which is central to the role’.



His role has much in common with other in-house heads of legal. By the time he reaches his desk in the morning, he will already have been ‘grabbed’ by several colleagues seeking instant advice. This is how it should be, he adds, because it is his job to train people to spot issues where legal advice is required and to give them the tools to help themselves, such as terms and conditions for purchase that can be used in countries throughout he world.



‘What sets us apart from the average in-house legal team working in a multinational context, of course, is the size of our budget for buying-in legal advice from external law firms,’ he says. ‘We spend the princely sum of £2,500 a year.’ In truth, Oxfam relies for external help mostly on the pro bono work of a panel of leading law firms, including Weil Gotshal & Manges, Allen & Overy and Wragge & Co.



Such budgetary constraints also oblige the Oxfam legal team to advise on areas outside their own expertise. Mr Saunders has recently advised on the setting up of an Indonesian climate change fund, for instance, and on a joint venture agreement to recycle clothing in Senegal. ‘Lawyers who practise in Indonesian or Senegalese law will have to approve the work, but we set the ball rolling,’ he says.



The legal team is surprisingly small, given Oxfam’s global reach. Alongside Mr Saunders are Claire Mortimer, formerly an intellectual property lawyer at Wragge & Co, Ruth Kim, who describes herself as a ‘reluctant solicitor and refugee from the conveyancing rat-race’, and Judith Haworth, a property lawyer dealing with Oxfam’s network of shops.



The team is completed by policy adviser Mike Parkinson, who has been a campaigner and lobbyist for the past 20 years, and by Mandeep Poonia, part-time team administrator and part-time law student. Mr Parkinson manages compliance issues across the 100 countries where Oxfam is active. He also helps manage Oxfam’s relationship with the Charity Commission, is a trustee of Amnesty International and chairman of the Charity Tax Group, which works to minimise the tax burden on charities.



In common with Mr Saunders, Ms Mortimer works on the full variety of Oxfam projects. ‘Just this morning I received a call from one of our shop managers,’ she says. ‘A local farmer had offered to lend him a goat to raise the profile of one of our campaigns. He wanted advice on risk management, in case the goat ate the municipal Christmas tree or butted a shopper.’



She has also worked on an arms-control campaign that helped lead to an agreement at the UN General Assembly in December 2006 to begin work on an international arms trade treaty. ‘There are treaties controlling the export of dinosaur bones and postage stamps, but no international regulation of the movement of the arms which fuel wars and terrorism,’ she says.



She is also learning all the time. Following the Pacific tsunami, she received an urgent request for a contract suitable for chartering helicopters. ‘That was something my background in intellectual property law had not prepared me for,’ she adds. Ms Mortimer has also been called upon to advise on projects such as growing mangoes organically in Ghana and forming a consortium to improve water supply in West Africa. ‘In each instance,’ she says, ‘we aim to achieve a balance between immediate humanitarian need and long-term sustainable development.’



Ms Mortimer adds that her experiences underline the fact that young lawyers working for Oxfam get responsibility sooner than their counterparts in private practice – responsibility that can often make the difference between life and death. This is one reason, she says, that firms are often keen to second trainees to the charity. One firm seconded trainees to Oxfam for four consecutive years, although over time the commitment grew too heavy to sustain. Wragge & Co have now agreed to share responsibility for providing secondees, and Ms Mortimer hopes that other law firms will step forward to help.



‘Reluctant solicitor’ Ruth Kim administers the legacies which philanthropically minded people leave Oxfam in their wills. These legacies can range from £50 to more than £1 million, with Oxfam sometimes just one of the dozens of charities named in the will. In such instances, says Ms Kim, the first-named large charity takes the lead to cut down on the legal costs.



Some projects are easier to raise funds for than others, she says. ‘People prefer to give their money to photogenic projects, where you can see your money being used to dig wells, build schools or plant crops. Advocacy and campaigning, on the other hand, don’t produce instant results – you sometimes have to wait decades to make a real difference – yet they are crucial for influencing government policies on fair trade, climate change and other issues. Legacies are unrestricted funds, which means Oxfam can choose to use some of the money to finance these long-term activities.’



Mr Saunders says every member of the legal team is fully part of the ‘Oxfam mission’ and that what they have in common is the desire to help overcome suffering. The charity’s emergency relief work attracts high-profile attention and inspires generous donations from the British public. Sustainable economic development, he says, is also of central importance and includes the ambitious aim of creating a fairer world – a world where wealth is spread fairly so that nobody goes without clean water, medicine, education and food.



But a cultural sea change is required before such a utopian vision becomes reality, he admits, citing gender discrimination as an example. ‘Women own just 1% of the world’s property, yet make up 50% of the world’s population,’ he says. ‘They also lose out on education, careers and political influence. We want to change that.’