Richard Tapp is a Chartered Secretary and Solicitor. He has spent his career in commerce and industry, training with the National Coal Board and then working with Imperial Foods, and Blue Circle Industries PLC, where he was for six years Company Secretary and Group Legal Adviser, responsible for all company secretarial and legal matters worldwide. Since 2001 he has been Company Secretary and Director of Legal Services for Carillion plc, where he is responsible for all legal, secretariat, estates and insurance matters. In 2002 he led a complete review of the legal provisioning of Carillion plc, establishing the Carillion Legal Network using state of the art practice techniques to reduce the number of law firms used by some two thirds and bring very significant reductions in cost and improvements in quality and service in managing the group’s multi-million pound legal spend.