Kier Strengthens Legal Leadership With New Deputy Role

Legal teams inside major infrastructure and construction groups are increasingly expected to do more than manage risk and compliance.

They are now asked to help shape strategy, keep pace with regulatory change, and govern the adoption of new technologies such as artificial intelligence.

Kier, a leading provider of infrastructure services, construction and property developments, has responded by creating a new Group Deputy General Counsel role and appointing Suzy Lovell to fill it.

The appointment reflects a broader pattern of large contractors building senior legal capability that sits close to the business, rather than at arm's length from it, as companies pursue long-term growth strategies.

A newly created leadership role

Suzy joined Kier in 2019 as Senior Legal Counsel and has since moved through the organisation into progressively senior positions, most recently serving as Head of Legal and Business Assurance for the group's Construction division.

In that role, she built an operationally focused legal team embedded within each of the division's business units, positioning legal expertise as a day-to-day partner to construction teams rather than a separate function brought in only when problems arise.

As the group's Deputy General Counsel, she reports directly to Stephen Milne, Kier's General Counsel and Company Secretary, and takes on a group-wide remit that extends her influence beyond the Construction division alone.

 "I'm incredibly proud to work at Kier, and delighted to be progressing my career with the newly created role of Group Deputy General Counsel," says Suzy. "There's so much opportunity within the built environment, from the 10-year infrastructure strategy, regulation updates and AI, and I'm looking forward to helping Kier seize those opportunities, manage risk effectively and support the delivery of our long-term growth ambitions."

Driving Kier's use of AI

Beyond her divisional legal work, Suzy assumes a role at the centre of how Kier approaches emerging technology, particularly artificial intelligence.

Legal functions across the construction sector are increasingly being asked to govern AI adoption rather than simply respond to it after the fact, balancing the operational upside of automation and data-driven tools against the governance, data-protection and liability questions that come with them.

Suzy's work in this space spans strategic oversight and hands-on delivery in equal measure. She will be:

• co-leading Kier's AI steering group, setting direction for how the technology is governed across the business
• enabling self-build initiatives that let teams develop their own AI-supported tools
• creating hackathons designed to surface practical AI use cases from within the workforce
• supporting enterprise-wide planning for how AI capability is scaled across Kier
• bridging legal governance with day-to-day operational teams working on live projects

"Suzy is a great legal leader, and this is a well deserved promotion, recognising her track record of delivery and expertise, alongside her enthusiasm for tackling the governance of emerging trends such as AI," says Stephen.

"I'm looking forward to working with her and the rest of the legal team to support Kier's strategic ambitions and our next phase of growth."

Kier's key business partners:

Nuvia
Nuvia is a nuclear engineering specialist that leads a joint venture with Kier, forming the core of the ILIOS consortium alongside AECOM, AL_A and Turner & Townsend. The partnership was appointed construction partner for the first stage of the UK's STEP fusion energy programme, a £200m (US$271m) three-year tranche.

Housing Growth Partnership
Housing Growth Partnership (HGP) is a residential investment vehicle that formed an equity joint venture with Kier Property to develop UK brownfield sites. The five-year, £80m (US$108m) 50:50 partnership targets 2,000 new homes for sale and rental, focused initially on urban regeneration sites across the South East of England.

Homes England
Homes England is the UK Government's housing accelerator, working with developers to increase housing supply. It formed a ten-year joint venture with Kier Living and Cross Keys Homes housing association to deliver up to 5,400 mixed-tenure homes nationally, using a capital-efficient model to accelerate development of Kier's residential land bank.