Meet our ESG team: Gilly Hutchinson

The Linklaters multidisciplinary ESG team has deep experience advising clients across a wide range of sectors and contexts on the full spectrum of environmental, social and governance issues. In this regular series, we hear from members of the team about their ESG experience, their career journey and their views on the evolving ESG landscape.

Gilly Hutchinson’s professional life came full circle when she arrived at Linklaters’s Hong Kong office in 2016 moving into the role as Head of ESG Regional Development for Asia in 2021. 

Her career had begun as a trainee with the firm back in 2004.

“I was really privileged to qualify into the project finance group in London and work on some phenomenal energy and infrastructure projects 

– from the financing of some of the first windfarms in Europe, construction of infrastructure projects in countries such as Greece and Cyprus to energy projects in the Middle East,” Gilly recalls. Among Gilly’s mentors in those early days were some of the great names in project finance at Linklaters or anywhere else in the profession. “I was Clive Ransome’s trainee, there was John Pickett and also Alan Black, Jeremy Gewirtz, Caroline Miller-Smith, Ian Andrews and Charlotte Morgan – and more recently in Hong Kong, Stuart Salt. Linklaters was a leader in the field and one of the first of the global law firms to see the importance of renewables, having set up a dedicated Green Energy Group back in 2000. As a junior lawyer working for John Pickett on some of the initial wind deals there was a real buzz and excitement given, at the time, renewables in general were a long way from the legal mainstream – the same excitement we later saw in Asia.”

“I went on secondment to what was then the Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) to work in the Office of Nuclear Development working on funding arrangements for private-sector operators of new nuclear power stations in the UK to meet the costs of decommissioning and waste disposal.

Not long afterwards, I was asked if I wanted to come and work full time as a policy advisor at the newly-created Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC).”

It was an offer that chimed with a number of Gilly’s interests.

“My background as a student had been in international politics before law school and I’d even had an early ambition to join the Foreign Office,” she says. “The opportunity of joining such a potentially dynamic new ministry was too tempting to ignore and I thought I’d go for it. It was an incredible experience to work at DECC for two years – I joined the strategy unit, analysing and advising ministers on the strategic direction of the UK Government’s energy and climate change policy – from improving energy efficiency of buildings, to scaling up renewable technologies, carbon, capture and storage to being part of the briefing team during the May 2010 elections which resulted in the coalition government but the one stumbling block was that I didn’t want to be out of the law for that long so started to get itchy feet to return to private practice.”

It was now that Gilly took the chance to try and fulfil a long-standing ambition. 

“I had always wanted to go and work in China,” she explains. “The country had always interested me from the academic point of view – as a student I wrote my dissertation on China’s position on international relations and started to learn Mandarin at university – and I’d travelled there a fair bit when I was younger so, eager for a new adventure, I thought I’d see if there might be anything suitable for me around there at a law firm. Within a few weeks, I’d landed a position with the project finance team at Milbank in Hong Kong and  I am still here in Hong Kong twelve years later!”

Having put down roots in Hong Kong, Gilly was in no hurry to leave, which would ultimately have been necessary if she was to remain at Milbank whose project finance hubs were in Singapore and Tokyo. 

When she returned to Linklaters, momentum in the energy transition and the emergence of the Asia renewables sector was in full swing and she was part of a team to be the first law firm to establish a dedicated Asia-Pacific Green Energy Group with dedicated renewable energy experts specialising in no – or low – carbon energy projects.

“It was probably around seven years ago that things really changed in Asia and we saw the increasing focus on renewable and other green energy deals in Asia,” Gilly says. 

“This was largely through a coming together of commercial banks and export credit agencies moving away from fossil fuel projects and looking to fund renewable projects at the same time that governments across the region were setting ambitious targets for the amount of energy to be generated from renewables.”

“Asia is clearly a ‘hot’ market for renewable energy - there is huge appetite for investment in these assets - as various countries seek to decarbonise and reach ambitious net zero targets. 

Having advised on most of the high profile offshore wind projects in the region, our Asia renewables practice is, by some margin, the most successful renewable energy legal practice in Asia – it has been incredible to be a part of this success story,” Gilly continues.

“Not only is Linklaters a market leader in the renewables space but we also had a competitive advantage in ESG with our longstanding ESG team.

I had the real pleasure to work with Vanessa Havard-Williams and Rachel Barrett when I was in London and so when the opportunity arose to be part of the ESG practice and collaborate on global ESG matters in which they were such pioneers it was a fantastic prospect.”

The ESG trend had continued unabated across Europe and North America and in 2021, it was decided by Linklaters that the firm needed to be in position to offer clients the right kind of tailored advice on the subject in Asia as well.

“ESG awareness has really increased in Asian markets in the last few years, and given we expect the pace of change to continue, there really needed to be a dedicated role here in Asia to respond to the increasing client demand for discussions on ESG issues and for ESG related advice,” Gilly explains. “The position of Head of ESG Regional Development in Asia was created and that became my role. I don’t sit with any one practice group; instead I work closely across all our Asia offices and our ESG experts from every discipline, as well as with my London and EU ESG colleagues.”

“The emphasis and discussions on ESG in Asia has really grown over the last two years and clients are under increasing pressure to adapt their business models, embrace sustainability and address ESG risks,” 

Gilly continues. “Asia emits over half of the world's greenhouse gas emissions yet parts of Asia are some of the most vulnerable regions in the world to the effects of climate change. What makes this position particularly interesting is that countries in this region are all at different points of their “climate journey”, depending on a host of factors. Emerging markets in Asia are balancing commitments to net zero and decarbonisation policies alongside the increasing energy demands of their developing economies – so the issues being discussed in an ESG context need to be viewed from an Asia perspective. As well as energy transition, areas such as sustainable finance, ESG-driven M&A and ESG-related contentious issues are other areas that will rise in importance and my task is to sit in the centre of the cross-practice, multi-jurisdictional ESG web that we have at Linklaters.”

It is a unique role at the firm and one that Gilly is patently enjoying enormously. 

“It ticks so many of the boxes that I’ve looked for in my career,” she agrees. “The scope of ESG is very broad, challenging and very much front of mind for our clients.”

This article was written for the Linklaters Alumni Newsletter by James Fairweather, Lexicon, June 2023.