Principal-led, with specialist depth where required.

Profile

Lee Vallender was called to the Bar of England and Wales by the Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn in 2005. He has spent more than 20 years advising public-sector organisations on regulation, governance and change, including more than nine years in regulatory transformation at Deloitte UK.

His career combines senior legal leadership in local government, as General Counsel at Manchester City Council and at the London Borough of Camden, with regulatory work at the General Medical Council and public-sector advisory work at KPMG and PwC.

Lee founded Devol Legal to provide the kind of regulatory advisory support that he saw public bodies consistently struggling to access: technically rigorous, operationally grounded, and capable of surviving scrutiny from members, auditors and the courts.

His practice spans licensing, enforcement, governance, markets regulation and public sector transformation. He is most frequently instructed where matters involve overlapping legal and operational complexity: contested licensing decisions with political dimensions, fragmented regulatory frameworks requiring modernisation, or transformation programmes where governance cannot afford to drift.

Career

1. Devol Legal — Founder and Director, advising public bodies on licensing, markets, enforcement, procurement, governance and transformation
2. Deloitte UK LLP — Regulatory transformation (9+ years), leading regulatory and transformation work for public sector clients
3. Manchester City Council — General Counsel, with responsibility spanning markets, street trading and major events including the Christmas Markets
4. London Borough of Camden — General Counsel, guiding a new strategy around regulatory services
5. General Medical Council — Regulatory work including the establishment of the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service
6. KPMG and PwC — Public sector advisory

Representative experience

• Led a city-wide overhaul of markets and street trading regulation for A Core Cities Authority, consolidating over 30 years of legacy instruments into a single defensible framework
• Designed and implemented a workforce governance compliance framework for Brent LBC across 12 policy areas, achieving zero non-compliance findings at subsequent external audit
• Advised the Home Office on aligning local authority licensing functions with immigration enforcement objectives under the Immigration Act 2016, developing a cross-agency protocol adopted across six pilot authorities and endorsed for national rollout
• Supported multiple metropolitan authorities on contested licensing hearings involving premises, taxi, and special treatment licensing where decisions carried significant political and reputational risk
• Led regulatory transformation programmes at Deloitte UK for local authorities facing budget constraints, delivering efficiency improvements of up to 30% whilst maintaining governance standards

Working with Lee

Devol Legal is a specialist practice rather than a firm with a pyramid beneath it. The person you brief is the person who does the work, and there is no commercial pressure to widen an instruction in order to keep a team busy.

Where a matter needs additional capacity, or a specialism outside the core practice, associates or counsel are brought in. That happens on a named basis, it is discussed with you first, and their contribution is never presented as in-house resource.

Devol Legal is remote-first and works with organisations across England and Wales. Advice, workshops, committee support and training are delivered by secure video conference and structured written work. It keeps overheads out of the fee and makes short-notice availability realistic, which matters when a committee date will not move.