The real importance of words

Secondly, the founder’s tireless energy and dedication to the mission, combined with the composition of Words Matter’s Advisory Board comprised of leading experts, and a trustee board with trustees with extensive experience from a broad range of backgrounds, gave reassurance that the charity was setting itself up for success. In addition, Maguelonne has long had a strong interest in charitable work, including during her time at Herbert Smith Freehills, and she felt her experience as a lawyer provided her with skills that would be of use to the charity. Finally, she has children of her own and felt strongly motivated to support a cause that would help support childhood development. 

While her legal skills always come in handy, she has not been taken on as a lawyer trustee. Rather, along with other trustees, she helps to provide the charity with guidance on strategic issues, ensuring the charity’s activities are in line with its stated mission, risk mapping and governance, along with more BAU activities such as discussing allocation of funds, employment of staff, fundraising, among other issues. “Our meetings are fascinating,” Maguelonne says. “The charity benefits from an Advisory Board comprised of leading academics and experts in the field of childhood development, many of whose books I have consulted as a parent, and our trustee board has a very diverse background, with former CFOs, experts in political affairs and public relations. You learn something new at every meeting. 

“Contributing to the trust meetings is both stimulating and humbling. As a lawyer, we are steeped in problem solving and risk mitigation. I hope I can apply these same skills to the development of Words Matter.” 

Words Matter’s work revolves around three pillars: research (to better understand the scale and impact of verbal abuse); awareness raising (through various national campaigns and access to free factual information and training); and collaboration with experts, academics, clinicians, childhood development specialists, organisations, decision makers and people with lived experience to create effective solutions to generate long-term change. 

In April this year, Words Matter hosted the first-ever international conference on childhood verbal abuse with the World Health Organization and University College London. The conference lasted a whole day and covered a range of topics, including the neurobiological consequences of childhood verbal abuse and the economic and societal costs of verbal abuse. The hope is that this event will trigger much greater awareness of the harm that verbal abuse can cause and from there to generate practical outcomes that help children to be safer. 

Back to the day job 

While not fulfilling her duties as a trustee for Words Matter, Maguelonne is an in-house counsel at Comcast, the broadcasting and television cable company, where she advises Comcast Cable’s international businesses outside of the US on disputes, regulatory and policy matters. 

During her time at HSF, she had primarily advised energy and infrastructure as well as financial services clients, quickly adapting to the broadcasting, advertising, media and tech industry which had not previously been her area of focus. But that was also part of the attraction for her. “One of the reasons I decided to join Comcast was precisely the challenge of operating in a different industry to one I had previously operated in, and taking on a broader advisory role advising a Fortune 50 company on its international operations. I felt the need to grow and it was, in many ways, a way of proving to myself that I could still rapidly pivot, upskill and adapt.” 

As with other in-house counsel, Maguelonne relishes being able to understand the business at a very deep level – especially one that is changing so fast as tech and media. She is required to understand the technical as much as the legal aspects of many of Comcast’s businesses. 

She is also operating in a fast-changing area of law, dealing with regulations that can be broad brush (covering a whole sector) to those relating to a particular product – not to mention the fact that she has to be fully up to speed with regulations that vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. 

With a strong in-house legal team, much of the work can be handled internally, but, nevertheless, she does need on occasion to instruct outside counsel – and Herbert Smith Freehills is one such firm that she instructs. 

Switching to law 

Maguelonne has a long association with HSF. As she puts it, “she fell into the law” having studied international relations. She did a vacation scheme with HSF and was offered a training contract and never looked back. “Law was intriguing for me. We worked on some fascinating cases for interesting clients, and, above all, I really liked the people in the firm.” 

At HSF, Maguelonne ran the firm’s Charity of the Year relationship with a great team of other volunteers for a number of years. This involved putting in place a rigorous selection process to shortlist charities to be put to the firmwide vote, running those charity partnerships, putting in place a calendar of fundraising activities and supporting the volunteers running these running internal awareness campaigns, and working with the charity. 

She was always astonished – and thrilled - at how well the firm’s people responded. She remembers one year running an Easter egg donation drive for CLIC Sargent (now Young Lives vs Cancer), to provide Easter eggs to those children and their families having to stay at Great Ormond Street Hospital for treatment over the holidays. The response was so overwhelming that they filled an entire office with the donations received. “We literally couldn’t walk into the room – it was filled from floor to ceiling!” she says.