Ruth Griffin: We are extremely proud to be Official Legal Advisers to the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games. Our work has involved bringing in a wide variety of teams from across the firm to support Birmingham 2022 in creating a foundation for an event in which history will be made. So in terms of what we've been supporting Birmingham 2022 with on a day-to-day basis, it's all legal support that a public body would need when they're organising an international sporting event. So there's workforce issues, procurement issues, so they need to buy everything for the Games.
So supporting them with works services and product procurements, supporting them with brand protection. There's also supporting with public sector specific issues, such as freedom of information requests and also the day-to-day general issues that you face as any organisation around data protection.
Heledd McBride: As part of my secondment I've been fortunate enough to be able to have a 360 experience of ticketing for an international sporting event. I've been involved in drafting the original ticketing contract, the ticketing T&Cs.
I've also then dealt with queries from the public in relation to the tickets that they've purchased. In addition to that, I'm also the Legal Lead for the Birmingham 2022 Ceremonies, Culture and Queen's Baton Relay department.
That's been fantastic. I've been dealing with Commonwealth Games Associations across the whole Commonwealth in managing the transportation of the Baton from country to country during the pandemic, which has been an experience in itself. And I'm now dealing with a domestic leg of the Queen's Baton Relay and can't wait to see it.
Ruth: I think the most exciting projects coming out of working on the Games has to be advising on the creation of the mascot, Perry the Bull. So this involved a cross-firm team providing expertise in a whole range of areas, which was needed to bring Perry to life. So it involved the competitions, advising on the terms and conditions, setting up a virtual mascot summit and the launch itself, which required deep legal expertise in areas such as licensing, design rights, talent agreements, social media influencing marketing, intellectual property and probably one of the most important things is the non-disclosure agreements to make sure Perry was kept secret for as long as possible.
Heledd: I think the most exciting project that I've been involved in so far has been the culture programme, putting all the work into all the commissioning agreements that have been working with communities across the whole of Birmingham West Midlands area, and actually seeing things come to life sooner than the start of the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games themselves.
Ruth: It's been an absolutely fantastic for our firm to be involved with the Games. It's a wonderful opportunity for the whole firm and has created fantastic experiences for a huge number of our people.