Catherine PalmerGeneral Counsel, KellyDeli
Catherine is General Counsel and board member with a life-long commitment to Franco-British relations in education, law and business.
Catherine’s career began teaching French in Inner London state schools. After a couple of years, intrigued by an advertisement in the Guardian in French for a lexicographer, she applied. This led to 10 years editing dictionaries for publishers including Oxford University Press/Hachette, Larousse, Collier Macmillan and Macmillan. Realising that the semantic skills she had practised had much in common with law, she then embarked on an BA in Jurisprudence at Oxford, gaining her degree in two years. She trained with Slaughter and May; then joined Browne Jacobson (acting for French clients investing in London, and for fashion clients which included Joseph) and Fladgate Fielder where she created the French desk. She then moved to her first in-house Head of Legal role with a French property company.
She was approached two years later to join fashion house Joseph. As General Counsel and member of the international board, Catherine also worked with the Japanese
holding group, on other projects such as luxury accessories brand Moreau Paris.
After leaving Joseph, she continued to work with leaders in dance shoes, Freed of
London, another company in the group.
Catherine is currently General Counsel of KellyDeli, an innovative food company which started in France, has its headquarters in London, and now operates across
eleven countries.
Catherine co-chairs the Chamber’s Retail Forum and sits on the Advisory Council.
More widely, in the Franco-British community, Catherine is a director and former VP of the Franco-British Lawyers' Society, a co-founder of the Champagne Louis
Roederer prize awarded to organisations which have demonstrated exceptional support to French women lawyers in London, and the founder of the Palmer Prize for
Translation at Queen’s College, Oxford.
Catherine went to the Lycée in South Kensington, followed by hypokhâgne and khâgne at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, the Sorbonne and Oxford. She was awarded
the Ordre National du Mérite in 2017.
In 2019, Catherine was In-House Lawyer of the Year for the Inspirational Women in Law Awards of the First 100 Years Project.
Living in Central London with her partner, the photographer Ander McIntyre, Catherine can be heard at St Pancras Station as the French voice of Eurostar.
