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Nina Barakzai, General Counsel for Data Protection and Group Data Protection Officer, Unilever

GC: What are the main themes running through Unilever’s use of technology?

Nina Barakzai (NB): Firstly, that tools should help us work more efficiently; secondly, implementation is a journey and we must see benefit; and thirdly, technology is disruptive but helps us build our professional competence as an in-house legal team supporting the business.

GC: Can you give any examples of technology initiatives used at Unilever?

NB: At Unilever, there are numerous technology initiatives spread across different business functions. We aim to be at the top of the list when it comes to talking about tools to help us work more efficiently. Some parts of our business use blockchain for certain types of activities; others have introduced a chatbot with machine learning to continuously improve the systems they use. Legal is building knowledge management tools to get to a single source of truth – a lot of the technology we’re using, because we’re operating at scale, supports us when we need to have information held reasonably accessible so that everybody can rely on them.

Implementation of this new capability is an ongoing journey to embed benefits and continue to develop and improve our processes and contract management. For example, Procurement implemented a contract lifecycle management tool. During that implementation phase, we found that the learning process was as much about adjusting to the realities of the software, as it was about doing what we needed to do. We have general terms and conditions and smarter contracting to tailor the generic terms, where appropriate. Internally, this shrinks contract life cycles, to deliver a consistent, end-to-end, contract automation process.

GC: What are some of the challenges of rolling out new technology?

NB: There is an enormous appetite for doing things efficiently. It’s obviously challenging if we’re in 190 countries and generate 190 country contract processes along the way. We have about 80 preferred partners worldwide who are working alongside us, who design things with us. That creative engagement is absolutely vital, because we design processes with our partners and us in mind. Together, we make space for collaboration.

Some of the billing that we get with our preferred external law firms has been adjusted so that we both can work within those formatted structures, and we use platforms that are well established in the market. Our focus is to help ourselves and our partners manage how we work together, so that we know when they are getting certain information, and we know how to keep everything running smoothly. We’re working, adjusting, enhancing, improving and making it more efficient.

There is an enormous appetite for doing things in a way that will run efficiently.

For some, anything new is a challenge to understand, learn and embrace. Others ask what will make life easier and want it immediately. There’ll be others who like to experiment and gradually incorporate new tools into their activities. We may not always have the luxury to deep-think every activity because sometimes we have to deliver advice and work with the business to execute specific outcomes. I think everybody goes through this type of experience at some stage. But I haven’t found anybody who doesn’t use any technology yet. I’ve found many people who are using lots of different technologies in lots of different ways, which I think is thrilling.

From my perspective, I like working with technology that is disruptive. It means I get to experience exciting developments as part of my work, with the added benefit of making my life easier. I think everyone who is in a fast-paced environment works to stay relevant and up to date, or risks disempowering themselves or being less effective. I’m conscious that not everyone thinks of these things in the same way or with the same enthusiasm. Working with technology needs to be made accessible. It’s easy to switch people off by making them feel they are somehow less capable because they cannot work a particular system, application or device. That doesn’t mean they’re bad lawyers, it just means they may need to have the information presented in a way that they understand.

GC: What does new technology mean for you?

NB: I’m tuned into how I can make better use of technology because that’s my work: I want to be able to handle data responsibly all the time, every day, every minute. I will always look for tools that keep me up to date and enable me to deliver privacy advice smoothly. Staying up to date means doing constant professional development. Practice makes perfect, but add in CPD and it reinforces the professional drive to stay up to date to do the best job for your clients. I want and enjoy doing a better job for my clients, so I work hard to understand the environment in which my clients are operating. Clients are doing more with more data, and that brings scale and complexity. I need to understand that.

One of my tasks is to help design control solutions in a privacy context. If there is a quick, easy way of determining whether, say, control 623 is more relevant than control 17, when working with, say, hundreds of controls, that will help me. People are more likely to make errors when operating in teams, running at speed to deliver cybersecurity and privacy controls. If internal advisers are on the move in factories or out in the field looking at tea crops, raw materials and other front-line activities, how do we make sure that they can see privacy advice and have information in bite-sized chunks, at their fingertips? So, just as in our everyday lives we look at platforms like YouTube to see how to work the cooker or to understand instructions for flat-packed furniture, we are making more video blogs and developing alternative ways for the business to access information on legal, privacy and cybersecurity topics. I’m looking at how to make things available via mobile, on devices. A key requirement is to make sure these alternatives work across multiple jurisdictions, making it easier for people to learn from the materials and leverage their own skills.

GC: Is there any technology you would like to have in future?

NB: Looking forward, I would like an AI bot for developing what I nickname a ‘privacy university’. People may think up creative ideas for dealing with privacy needs in their business areas; others may feel anxious that, although they are experts in one or more areas of law, they don’t have a good grasp of privacy laws. My hope is that, through the use of technology, my colleagues can ask a simple question all the way through to a more complex query. A privacy bot that can give a quick answer, in a tailored business context, could help a colleague along an entire spectrum of knowledge, simply by being a starting point for additional resources. Colleagues can work with confidence, knowing where to look and who to ask. My task in privacy is to help change their inner thought of ‘I don’t know what the question means’ to a feeling that they know where to get guidance, get help in understanding the question or, better still, find an answer that can be tailored and made relevant for the issue on which they are working.

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Prof Christophe Roquilly, Dean for Faculty and Research, EDHEC Business School

The use of technology by in-house teams is evolving – particularly compared to what existed a few years ago, two years ago, or even one year ago. Yet still, for legal departments, change is much less quick than in law firms.

Big legal departments are investigating the possibilities and opportunities offered by new technology. There was a survey done in 2017 targeting French in-house counsel, which showed that many needed more software and applications for legal tasks. But at the same time it was more commonly expressed – by more than 50% – that this was not a need at present.

I wouldn’t say there is a kind of collective trend: I think it really depends on the culture of every individual, every lawyer, the culture of the legal department, and the culture of the company itself. But if I look at a period of five years, there is an increasing trend towards a willingness to understand what is happening, what works and what does not work in terms of technology, what the best practices to benchmark for in-house lawyers are – and also to think in terms of investment and return on investment.

I remember speaking to the GC of a very big French company. He said, ‘You know, I’m convinced that some of this technology is going to be very useful for the legal department – but there is a cost, and I need to convince the executive committee, or even the board, that the cost is justified: that we expect a return on investment, so it means cost reduction for the legal department, how we are going to be able to increase the performance of the legal department in terms of service delivery, satisfaction of the clients and also improvement of our own KPIs.’

(Virtual) reality check

Areas in which some in-house teams in France are using technology include legal research and information, case matter management, contracts management and contracts automation, legal knowledge management, and project management. And, of course, e-billing, selection of legal service providers, benchmarking, sharing of the best practices within the legal team – and this is especially the case in big legal departments. Some of them are using predictive justice tools – although it’s very few, it’s just the beginning – and I would say it’s more used by law firms than legal departments.

As far as machine learning and real artificial intelligence go, I think we are still a little bit far away from that. For blockchain, especially for smart contracts, there is a start: for instance, for intellectual property rights management. Some are thinking about the possibility of using blockchain technology to manage the participation of shareholders during general assembly. There is also the smart contract approach of using blockchain technology for contracts between shareholders, for instance to organise the control of the company, or to have agreement provision in the case of share selling. As far as I know, legal departments do not directly use big data analytics, but they can work with some law firms that do.

I think that the particular areas right now where the technology is the most useful are document review, case review administration and case analytics, legal research, document drafting, knowledge sharing and communication. But when you think in terms of legal writing and advising clients, I think that – right now – the effect or impact of the new technology and data analytics and so on is very low.

Some are thinking about the possibility of using blockchain technology to manage the participation of shareholders during general assembly.

When you look at the current legal technology and new legal technology and what they propose in terms of services, it’s moving really fast. But the next steps – more deep learning, machine learning and real artificial intelligence – frankly speaking, will not come within ten years. The creator of DeepMind, which was acquired by Google, said something which was really interesting: when you hear people saying that tomorrow everyone will be replaced by robots, and we will be able to have a full, sophisticated conversation with an artificial agent, he said no: that’s not serious. What is serious is the ability to replace standard analysis and decisions with robots. Analysis further than that, when there is more room for subjectivity and when the exchange between different persons is key in the situation, the Turin stage of artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, deep thinking and so on is not at the right level. We are not there yet.

Redefining value add

One important point when considering the value of technology – something which is happening in some law firms already – is change in the value chain of the legal department.

Typically, you have information entered into the ‘system’ of the in-house team and, at the end, you need to provide a service – advice or a solution. All the segments of the chain, like information gathering, information analysis and treatment, document drafting, due diligence, are going to be more and more digitalised, and done increasingly less by human beings. This means that the skills required for lawyers are going to change, and the quality of the relationship between the client and the legal adviser is going to become more important. Right now, I don’t see any robots directly advising clients because they are not sufficiently sophisticated. But for the lawyer to give good advice, fully understanding the needs of the client and having sufficient time to discuss their analysis with the client – what are the facts, what is the law, what is the content of the regulation, what is the state of the jurisprudence or case law – all of this is going to be done faster, which will leave more time to deliver very high quality advice and service.

The freed-up time can then be used on other important areas. Lobbying is one of them because, surprisingly, in France, the lobbying role of lawyers is not always taken into account by legal departments. Giving the possibility to legal teams to think more about the future of the law in their domain regarding their businesses or the businesses of the company is very important, but you need time to do that. It’s not directly productive, but it can have a huge impact over time. It will also allow departments to take time to train non-lawyers and to increase the global level of the legal education in the company – to reduce the common questions. The other side of that is that there’s also the potential to increasingly automate processes – improving efficiency and quality of services across the board.

Training lawyers of the future

What we need to be doing in the here and now is, when we train future junior lawyers, they need to know how to use data analytics, how to use the new tools which are available on the market, and maybe we also need to train them to understand how algorithms work, even if we are not going to create hordes of lawyers who can code. To understand what it means when you code, and what are the consequences in terms of legal mechanisms, legal analysis, or legal documents, to have fundamental tools to understand what coding means, is going to be very important for them.

The second important point, I think, is to reinforce their soft skills, because the relationship with the core business will be more and more about the quality of the relationship. For instance, what about empathy? Being able to take time to listen to the client, to take their point into account. Knowing that the time you spend for legal research, information retrieving and analysis is going to be reduced and reduced and reduced, if you want to maintain the same revenue for a law firm or the same level of service for a legal department, you need to perform better elsewhere.

As educators, we need to be doing these things. If we do not, we hear from young students who are going to intern for six months or a year, coming back from legal departments or law firms saying, ‘Well you know, we had to work with this tool or that tool, or there was discussion about using a new tool to improve the relationship with the external suppliers, e-billing, and so on, and we didn’t have any clue about what they were talking about.’ Even if you are not convinced, you need to better train your students on these kinds of tasks because they ask for it. There is a demand for it.

Practitioners know better than academics what are the most up-to-date tools they are using in the industry. But I think it’s the role of academics to prepare students to be able to be flexible, reactive and to be able to switch from one tool to another one and to have a global vision, a global understanding of what is happening. And to make them aware that there is a certain level of uncertainty in practice. Usually, when you study law, you do not like that: you like certainty, and the more it is fuzzy or blurry, the less you feel comfortable. We need to prepare them for that.

Technological Darwinism

Now, the question is: is technology going to kill some jobs? I would say, yes of course. Will it promote the creation of new jobs? I think so. Will it change the type of skills required for lawyers? I think it will. I think that the development of these new tools is more an opportunity than a threat if they provoke a change in the business models and the way lawyers deliver their services in the interests of the client. But if some so-called artificial intelligence can lead to weak services and fragile legal advice, then they will be stopped or simply not used. So I think the market will decide and will make a distinction between good stuff and bad stuff.

It seems strange, because sometimes lawyers are perceived as being very conservative, but I can tell you that in France, the legal domain is just after finance in terms of being active in start-ups. I mean, legal tech versus fintech versus other kinds of activity – legal tech is very, very active. Recently, I was surprised to find that that the legal tech that we observed two or three years ago is still alive. Maybe, at the end of the day, you have a Darwinian system where the most adapted survive. You cannot have, for instance, tonnes of companies in France proposing predictive justice because the market is not so big. But I would say that the legal domain is very well placed in France, and could rank well in terms of intensity and innovation; it’s very active. Which is surprising, because lawyers are perceived as being the most conservative compared to some other professionals.

An important objective or challenge is to make in-house counsel more comfortable with the technology, doing demos, sharing success stories, sharing best practices and, to a certain extent, kill the myth that technology is too complicated: that it’s not for you guys because you are lawyers.

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Dr Alexander Steinbrecher, Head of group corporate, M&A and legal affairs, Bombardier Transportation

I would say that at Bombardier Transportation Group, we’re not using technology in the way we could be and should be using it – I would self-critically say that we’re in the bottom third if I look around – but we have taken the decision, as the leadership team in the legal community, to tackle it.

Global application

I see two challenges of employing technology in an in-house legal context. One is budget and the second is that we need software applications that work around the globe. It doesn’t help us if we find the perfect solution for the legal team in Germany – we need to find the global application that the legal team can use in the UK, in France, in Sweden, in Thailand, in the US, in Australia, in South Africa, in India – you name it. It needs to be a software that is so generic that it can be universally used, possibly also in different language settings, because despite being a global firm where English is the company’s language, we still do have local languages used in contracts.

Be brave: think long term

Budget, of course, is always an issue because you need to have a convincing business case. You need to go to the CFO and say, ‘I need the budget of X, I will invest in legal tech applications, and the return on the investment is Z, and Z is higher than X.’ But how do you make that case? I would not like a conversation, which I’m concerned some of my colleagues have had, where the CFO says, ‘Sure, I will give you the budget of X, but then please sign here that you will, in return, reduce the head count in your legal team by 20 or 30%.’ It doesn’t work like that.

I think the return on the investment in legal tech and software application is mid term and long term, it’s not short term. It’s not: you buy this software or this contract generator, or this chat bot and then Peter and Paul can take a hike. It’s not that simple, and if that’s the equation, then the equation will fail and in-house legal teams will not be successful in convincing their CFOs, because they will be shooting themselves in the foot. In the long run, they may have a lower need to hire new in-house lawyers. Even in the mid term I would say that’s doable, but not in the short term. You need to be brave to make the investment, because it’s difficult to predict the yield of return from the investment for the legal team.

Window-shopping for tools… and best practice

I see the benefits of legal tech software and legal tech applications not as a means to cut down on headcounts in in-house legal teams, but as a means for in-house lawyers to be relieved of wasting their time on administrative, repetitive, non-value-add work, so they have more time to spend on brain work where, luckily, software is not yet better than the human brain or the legal mind. I really see it as an enabler to focus more on value-added legal work to support bringing the business forward, so I think we are doing our own in-house lawyer profession good if we find ways to manage our time and our energy better. I’m coming from the perspective of increasing the efficiency, effectiveness and impact of in-house lawyers, rather than just looking for a cost-cutting measure.

Recently, a German law firm showed me a smart contract generator tool. The software asks you questions, asks you to provide information and data and then after 50 questions, you have a fully fledged procurement contract. It’s such an easy approach because a company that develops tech software for lay people came up with this idea and they just transferred this approach, a way of guiding a lay person through legally relevant stuff to create the output, which then is a contract. I see various applications for that, for simple contracts that are really standardised, like non-disclosure agreements, a simple lease agreement, a simple purchase agreement, or a simple labour contract. It can be used for any contract that a company uses on a repetitive basis. So it could be for one company’s licensing agreement, it could be for another company purchasing raw materials, it could be for another company purchasing professional services. Whatever the contract, on a repetitive basis, from Monday through Friday, it can be easily standardised and then created by clicking the mouse, rather than typing letters and numbers for hours, creating and drafting a contract.

85% of the jobs that people will have in 2030 don’t exist today – which is quite frightening.

Another area is copying what service providers have created for end users. For example, one telecommunications company in Germany created an application that you can use if you’re suffering from problems in your WiFi at home. Rather than calling a service line and waiting for 30 minutes hearing lousy music, the app connects to your WiFi router and does some things in the background and tests the connection without you seeing it. If the app (that you can use on your smartphone) detects a problem, it guides you through solving the problem. You don’t have to waste your time on a service line, you’re not wasting money on that call, and you get a quick solution. Something like that could also be used for standard legal questions in a big company that the business asks again and again and again. You just feed the software with information that only a lawyer can give, the software works by itself, the business is supported and they don’t have to phone up the lawyer.

The magic pill that I would like to find, and then eat and swallow, is a software application that we feed with the terms and conditions of our contracts. Based on our project execution experience, the software tells me which are the hot clauses and the cold clauses and, on the hot clauses, what different clauses we have used and how we can improve those hot clauses by learning from our own contracts around the globe. I think we can greatly improve knowledge management when it comes to our own contract execution around the globe.

2030 vision

I was reading the other day that, according to one global consulting firm, 85% of the jobs that people will have in 2030 don’t exist today – which is quite frightening, because it means that only 15% of today’s jobs will survive to 2030. But I would not say that 85% of what I’m doing with my legal team will no longer be done by us in 2030; I see different angles.

There’s one angle where I have the private citizen in mind, and yes I think there will be a huge disruption of how people like you and I, in our private lives, use legal services. I think if you look at the available tools already now, there will be less and less need to engage a lawyer to help you resolve your legal questions and legal disputes.

For companies, by 2030, if they are smart, they will have smaller legal teams but still continue to insource legal services, so they will use less and less external legal advice. I would say that smart in-house legal teams will have managed to develop in-house legal expertise and knowledge in areas where they are no longer dependent on external lawyers, and they can only do that because they are no longer wasting their time and energy on low-skilled, legal administration work. I think it will help the smart in-house legal teams to improve legal quality in areas where they are currently dependent on external experts, so I think it will be tight for external lawyers rather than for in-house lawyers, because there will simply be a decrease in engaging external lawyers.

But not for the real global law firms who make a fortune from global transactions where you need so much more brains and hands than a mid-size law firm can possibly get together. For mid-size law firms, it will be tough moving forward into the future, and you see it already – there’s a big trend of consolidation in mid-sized law firms. I would say that the landscape of law firms will look very different in 2030.

It was acceptable in the 80s

We are quite a conservative profession, at least in Germany, and we are under immense pressure to stop conserving the way we work rather than opening ourselves up to new ways of working. The days where a partner or an associate in a law firm can shift all technical stuff – word processing, Excel, PowerPoint – to an administrator are over with and, sooner or later, there will not be a person who does all that for you and you charge it to your client. I think we all need to step up our technical skills and internet skills and software skills, because our way of working as lawyers, and in-house lawyers, is pretty much the same as in the 1980s –and I don’t think that that’s sustainable.

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In conversation: Supriya Gogia, Legal Counsel, Asics

GC: Tell me about your role and how you came to be at Asics.

Supriya Gogia (SG): Asics opened its Southeast Asia regional headquarters in 2012 here in Singapore. I joined Asics in 2016. Prior to this, I was working for a retail e-commerce company which was a first mover in the region. After a good run with online retail, I was looking to get some hands-on experience in offline retail as well. That’s how Asics happened. Asics has been in the region for six years. It has expanded exponentially during this period. Asics started off fairly early in Europe, and America, and other regions in the world, purely because these regions were seen to be more health conscious and sports-centric back then. This consciousness came to SE Asia in the last 15 to 20 years or so, and now the fitness industry in Asia Pacific is worth a whopping $16.8 billion – the highest value ever. There hasn’t been a better time to be here.

GC: It must be quite interesting for you – as you said you started in the online retail business and then moved offline – what was that transition like?

SG: E-commerce in Southeast Asia has been very hot for the last five years, as it is elsewhere in the world. The only impediment in Southeast Asia is that regulations and laws catch up slowly with technology. Technology is moving much faster than legislation, and this game of playing catch-up sometimes ends up impacting the industry adversely. In-house counsel need ratification for creative business models that companies are trying to implement; when we go to external counsel, they do not necessarily have black and white advice because the industry is nascent, it’s very niche, and there are very few companies which are acting as disruptors and pushing boundaries. At the same time, jurisdictions are in the midst of formalising relevant legislation, which makes it imperative that we work closely with external counsel as well as government authorities. Regulations in different countries in Southeast Asia keep evolving and it’s important for us to understand if any upcoming legislation is going to have an impact, either positive or negative, on existing business plans.

For me, the move from e-commerce has been very interesting indeed. Offline retail is more traditional, organised and risk averse as compared to e-commerce, even regulations concerning offline retail are better set out. There is a lot to learn as counsel because most consumer retail brands take pride in store concepts and their existence, which means both offline and online sales channels are important for consumers. As such, being in a spot which is ever-changing and still very new is quite challenging, but it’s equally interesting if you want to be an industry expert. My experience has been very fulfilling and I think these skills become advantageous along the way. All companies want to be online – most of them are there already – so it is a very interesting prospect for my personal growth and contribution to the retail industry. Omni-channel experience is something that is likely to become more of a necessity than choice.

GC: Do you have any sense of why e-commerce has exploded the way it has, in Asia specifically?

SG: Yes. I feel the reason for that is: one, Asia has a relatively younger population, compared to other parts of the world. And secondly, I feel that when you talk about the fourth revolution, it is different from the first three because the first three began in different parts of the world – the first one started in Britain, the second in North America and so on, but I feel the fourth industrial revolution – and this is completely a personal opinion – it started all over the globe, all at once. For instance, even if Apple is designing a phone in California, there is a manufacturer assembling it in China. It is a very collaborative revolution, where countries are coming together to give the end product to the consumer. This is what makes Asia very relevant in this revolution because it is not left behind, it is in fact playing a very significant role. This e-commerce explosion is also partly due to cheaper labour costs and strengthening of the manufacturing industry in this region. Because labour is cheaper in Asia, we have a growing service industry which is well equipped to support e-commerce operations and a massive manufacturing set-up. These are industries which give a strong foundation to e-commerce.

GC: Asics is looking to increase presence in other markets in Southeast Asia soon – how do these markets differ from those where Asics is already well-established?

SG: Asia is unique in that sense. Not all Asian countries offer seamless market entry for foreign companies, some economies are closed and protected. When a Japanese company like ours wants to establish a foothold – it’s not free entry. For some countries you either need to partner with a local venture or you need to invest additional capital to be able to engage in industry-specific activities. That said, these markets have immense potential for expansion, with a growing middle class and a surge in awareness surrounding fitness and sporting goods. We work very closely with external counsels in these countries since language can be a barrier at times. The majority of government documents in Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand are in local languages which require local expertise to decipher.

GC: As a large, recognisable brand, intellectual property must be of particular concern. Could you talk a little about that?

SG: Yes. Intellectual property is the most valuable asset for any global company – for consumer goods it’s the most important piece of brand management. As I mentioned before, the bulk of manufacturing for consumer goods is done in Asia, and this comes with a downside for brand protection. There could be instances where one factory might be manufacturing goods for different brands, and no matter how well you articulate the liability clauses, how meticulous your contracts are, there is bound to be leakage. Leakage is when original products are leaked through the factories into open markets. Brands also face issues of counterfeit products, which originate from factories which create copies of authentic products. When you operate in a region that manufactures, you have to be extra cautious of these infringements, which are potential high risks for the brand.

GC: Is there anything that you see coming on the horizon that might affect the industry?

SG: I do think the concept of augmented reality is quite intriguing, as well as the trend of pop-up stores – which is quite common in Asia – where you can try a pair of footwear, get the “touch and feel” of the product and use a tablet or iPad available at the pop-up to order that product. The product could be delivered to your address the very same day. You don’t need to stock up inventory, the space required is minimal, which ensures you don’t pay exorbitant high street rentals and human resources involved are far less. I do foresee this as being a popular way to shop for countries where internet penetration is high.

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In conversation: Crystal Lalime, head of APAC global markets legal, Credit Suisse

GC: Technology in finance is a hot topic – especially here in Hong Kong. What are your perspectives on this and what is Credit Suisse doing in this area?

Crystal Lalime (CL): Technology is changing finance, it is changing banking and, in the process, creating new pathways for Legal to play a role.

Recently, we partnered with a fintech company called Canopy Pte Ltd. What their technology allows is for clients to consolidate their accounts on the automated account aggregation platform, so an individual can manage their whole portfolio from a single platform, which is quite a powerful tool for our clients. We identified a company that we thought provided a very good solution for our clients and took an investment in the company to provide that service to our clients.

This is a major trend in the industry and we are very much a part of it.

GC: Can you describe the partnership approach that Credit Suisse takes to working with start-ups?

CL: With start-ups, you see a lot of interesting technology, but a lot of the times it becomes about who they partner with, where their distribution chain is, what their path to market is and whether there is a really strong use case. As lawyers, we can’t necessarily keep up with the technology development, but we certainly have ideas about how they can be partnered with or integrated into Credit Suisse.

Our approach so far has centred on just that – partnering. A lot of AI technology partners may be attracted to partnering on certain projects with us because of the large data dumps we can provide to train their algorithms, but oftentimes finding a use case that makes sense on the legal technology side for CS and the technology provider can be time-consuming.

GC: When working with start-ups, what role is Legal asked to play?

CL: As we look at these opportunities with start-ups, that also presents new challenges for Legal. Oftentimes, start-ups aren’t as well governed as we’d expect – particularly with the high standards we’re accustomed to operating within. Legal plays a prominent role in advising on the due diligence and sometime restructure of start-ups, which isn’t unexpected – these are M&A deals after all – but the issues which arise can be more varied.

When you’re running a start-up, budget is a huge consideration, but when you’re working with financial institutions – areas like compliance are ones where there isn’t room for error. Sometimes you’ll see that there are certainly the right intentions in mind, but a start-up might employ a junior compliance officer to help them get on the right track – but as you scale up and you’re running a big platform – the compliance may be extremely onerous.

Once a partner is identified, there’s a whole host of further issues for Legal to consider. What are the processes in place for handling data, moving data and protecting data? If we’re co-developing products, who is going to own the IP? What about if there’s interest from other financial institution’s to licence the technology – how do we handle that? It takes a lot of creativity and diligence, as well as constant training and upskilling for the legal teams who may have previously been advising on selling products and are now involved in offering software services. There is a lot of crossover and innovation requiring product and IP legal expertise. We’re not just providing advice on legal issues – advising on strategy.

GC: Being asked to work on projects like this is outside of the typical scope we often hear from GCs – particularly in finance. Have you had to adjust your approach in terms of hiring or training your staff as a result?

CL: That is a real challenge that we face. It comes back to the core values of our GC department, which are legal advisory, legal service provider and strategic adviser. To continue to provide these in a changing environment, it means that we have to be constantly upskilling – and that goes both for myself and for my team.

It also means that I’m more frequently taking stock of what skillsets we have on our team and what we might need to stay ahead – one day it could be looking for a programmer or a computer science person, the next we could be looking at these start-up-style deals, where perhaps we need people specialised in IP or outsourcing – it’s really about constantly staying on top of what we have and what we need.

I think as a broader trend, this is true for a lot of legal departments. The nature of legal work, as much as it stays the same, the applications change and how we go about completing that work is changing too. At the moment, many of the lawyers on my team are working with technologists (e.g. programmers and other platform specialists) – that’s a direct result of a lot of our legal documentation being automated. On the team, you have to have lawyers willing to do what may be perceived as non-traditional legal work and explain to non-lawyers our trade. That goes both ways too – on the other side, we need to have programmers and technologists who are willing to work with lawyers. It’s a paradigm shift and the overlap between technology and legal is growing constantly – and that’s not something I see changing any time soon.

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In conversation: Randi Ikhlas Sardoni, Head of Legal and Corporate Secretary, Panin Dai-ichi Life

GC: Can you tell me a little bit about your background, how you came to be working in-house, in the financial services industry and at Panin Dai-ichi Life in particular?

Randi Ikhlas Sardoni (RIS): I was born into a legal background family – my grandfather, father, uncles, aunts, cousins, brother, you name it. We hand over books from generation to generation. But that is in the private sector – surprisingly there has been no one working in-house – so I had to take the first step in the family. I only spent a couple of months in private practice, and then I took my career to work as in-house counsel at one of the biggest state-owned banks in Indonesia.

I found out that the insurance sector in Indonesia was growing and offering a lot of opportunities and challenges, and also that there was a scarcity of local talent. With the economy growing and many insurance companies entering the Indonesian market and competing for the same talent, there is a shortage in the market. Now I am at an insurance company, and have fallen in love with the sector.

GC: What are the main challenges of the Indonesian insurance market?

RIS: Indonesia is an emerging market and has high potential for the insurance sector. The main challenge currently is the market penetration. Insurance penetration in Indonesia is still around 2.9% compared to GDP. Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia have much higher penetration.

GC: Why is it so low?

RIS: I think one of the problems is financial literacy, particularly insurance literacy. There is scepticism about the insurance industry in Indonesia. The Indonesian financial authority, the OJK, has addressed this issue and it has required insurance companies to have a campaign for financial literacy, to increase market penetration.

GC: Can you talk a little bit about the regulatory environment in Indonesia?

RIS: The legal team will transform – we are no longer a braking system in the car, but we will become a navigation system. We are shifting our role from the defending player into the playmaker. We have to be able to provide strong legal advice and also excellent risk advice to the board and this ability will help the board to be the one sitting in the driving seat to direct the company. The legal team has to have strategies for providing sound legal input with strong business acumen, in anticipating changing regulations.

In ensuring the fair and supportive regulatory reform, government relations activities must also be addressed. General counsel must act as the advocate of the company by utilising the industry association bargain with the regulator.

GC: Are there any other main business challenges that the company is grappling with at the moment?

RIS: There is an untapped market in Indonesia. To become one of the top five or top three insurers in the Indonesian insurance business, we as a company have to produce a value proposition for prospective customers, cover for all the various social and economic channels, and develop the ability to penetrate the untapped market and create the system of brokerage. Indonesia has such a huge population, with only 2.9% market penetration. Currently many of the population are in a household of mainly generation X and Y. So that will be the focus of the company, and we are helping the company to be able to achieve those goals.

GC: What does your workload look like day to day? What occupies the majority of your time?

RIS: As the general counsel of the company, I am of course the subject legal matter expert. Currently, legal issues are still dominating the daily workload. However, standardisation of legal work and IT have helped users to have faster and more immediate attention from the legal department. So aside from the helping with the legal issues, we are currently in the process of designing a platform for stakeholders to have their wholesale legal needs met in one IT application, in one single window.

We are asking our stakeholders what is their expectation of the legal department, and then, in a couple of years, we will have that kind of application.

GC: What has been the highlight of your in-house career so far?

RIS: Probably experiencing a fast-track career compared to my peers in the market and the industry. Despite being part of the millennial generation, the board has entrusted me to serve them with the company secretary function and also with the counsel of the company. I think I certainly understand that this responsibility has to be managed properly, and also as currently we are in the spirit of the Asian Games, I am co-opting the energy of Asia tagline to the legal team – that youth spirit. My team are the problem-solvers, and we operate as a start-up legal team within the company.

GC: What does your legal team look like?

RIS: We currently have a lean, but highly effective legal department. Currently we have three lawyers – one who is responsible for corporate legal and secretarial, another responsible for government relations, and another for litigation respectively.

GC: What has been the most challenging moment of your legal career so far?

RIS: We are currently helping the company to embrace a new era, and we are also repositioning our place from legal advisory to business advisers. We are now really trying to create initiatives that translate that vision of legal and business advisers. We are trying to really listen to the business units and respond to them. We are now even thinking about having an internship programme into the business units, so that the legal team have experience in the business unit. After that, they will go back into the legal team with the proper knowledge – not only sitting at the desk doing the legal job, but really knowing what the business person is doing and experiencing for a certain period of time.

GC: What have been the major challenges or activities for you and your legal team over the past year?

RIS: One is always about digitalisation. Everyone is doing this, and we are now also expecting to be able to adapt and support the company in the digitalisation process. Technology has been a topic of conversation within the industry. We are in the age of the digital disruption, financial technology disruption, and now people are looking at insurance technology (instech). So that will also be something that we have to be able to adapt to, and also help the company to compete with that.

In terms of regulation, insurers have to be ready to spin off their Sharia units, as required by the 2014 insurance law. We have to submit the blueprint for the spinoffs by 2020, and they have to have spun off by 2024, so this is becoming a hot topic of conversation everywhere in the industry. We have to be able to ensure that the process of spin off is running smoothly and successfully.

Now, the issues relate to how to ensure that when the spinoff company is independent from the holding company or the conventional company, it will be competing with the other Sharia companies in Indonesia, and not with the conventional company.

There will be a lot of discussion about how to also train the financial advisers. Currently, we have financial advisers that hold two licences, a conventional licence and a Sharia licence. But after the regulation takes effect, they have to advise just the conventional or just the Sharia businesses. So these are will be several things that have to be taken care of and discussed properly.

GC: What else have you got coming up on the horizon over the next 12 months or so?

RIS: The next 12-24 months will also be about how to simplify the insurance process, to help society increase financial literacy, so people will be able to understand an insurance product properly. We all know that there is so much complicated language, so we have to able to simplify that language into more commonly understood language for society. I think that will also be the process over the next 24 months.

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In conversation: Dominic Gyngell, general counsel, Speedcast Industries

GC: How did you get to your position at Speedcast?

Dominic Gyngell (DG): I had been at BT for 13 years when I got approached by Speedcast in 2014. It was really interesting because it was telecoms-related but a much smaller company with big ambitions. It had achieved impressive growth, the company had been around in some form since 2001 but it was only when it was listed on the Australia Stock Exchange in 2014 that it landed on its feet and started to grow an aggressive international strategy.

GC: Were you involved in the company’s listing?

DG: I joined in early 2016 post IPO – it was a steep learning curve for me. I am involved in continuing disclosure obligations in Australia and since then we’ve done a number of things including two more equity raisings in Australia and a refinancing programme where we moved our debt from Australia to the US market.

GC: How have you grown the legal team in that time?

DG: The legal team was small at first, there were just three of us when I joined. Since then we’ve expanded, we have 15 lawyers globally. We provide satellite communications to some pretty remote parts of the world, operating in over 100 countries and with offices in 40.

Our largest markets are the US: we do a lot of work for the US government, large energy companies such as ConocoPhillips. We do work in Southeast Asia and Africa, and dealing with regulators and governments in the US is very different from working with businesses in Myanmar and Kazakhstan. It really varies.

GC: How is the legal team structured?

DG: We are organised regionally, we have a team based in the Americas, one covering EMEA and one in Asia.

GC: What does your job look like on a day-to-day basis?

DG: The role is very diverse: this week I’ve been dealing with labour disputes in Brazil, new customer contracts, board meetings in Angola and Sydney, a property deal in Peru, whilst balancing all the day-to-day operations. Every day is different. My job has changed a lot since I joined when we were a $200million company; today we have revenue of 1 billion US dollars. We’ve gone from 300 staff to 1500 in that time. We’ve got a lot more sophisticated. A big part of my job is working on M&A; we’ve done 15 deals since 2012. We acquired our most recent company last week – one of our largest competitors in the US, Globecomm. They operate in 100 countries.

GC: What sectors do you cover?

DG: Speedcast has four main divisions: maritime, which includes providing telecommunications services to cruise ship operators around the world, and commercial maritime, which covers smaller vessels. Energy is our second biggest division – our main customers are offshore oil and gas companies. We are increasingly serving governments, as well as the military, mining companies and NGOs.

GC: What are the biggest challenges on the horizon for you over the next 12 months?

DG: Compliance continues to grow – we are seeing a lot of change with regards to ethical compliance. Anti-corruption, bribery, regulatory compliance, all remain key issues for our type of business. We have just done a large GDPR programme in Europe, and I expect to be dealing with increasing data protection legislation.

From an internal perspective, we are focusing on integrating the 15 new businesses we have acquired. A large part of this is bringing together different teams, and this will be a challenge getting our systems aligned and dealing with cultural issues.

GC: Have you introduced technology within the legal department?

DG: We’ve just launched a programme to digitise all of our customer contracts onto a single database that can be accessed by the whole legal team and operations. For the first time, we can get centralised data on all of our larger customers and our supplier contracts. We deal with dozens of bids and contracts around the world so we have also automated our approval processes, so that they are all on one system.

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Stacy Cozad, General Counsel, Spirit AeroSystems

I think there are a lot of lawyers who have a vision of their career when they first start out, but I was not one of them. I didn’t have a plan to become a general counsel, for example. I simply had the good fortune of meeting the right people at the right time and being open to new challenges. My career path has been about the people that I’ve met who have been my advocates and promoters along the way.

I started my career clerking for a judge who is now the US Senate Majority Whip, John Cornyn. He was someone who really valued his staff’s views and insights, and I wanted to be a courtroom lawyer in front of judges who respected me like the judge I worked for did.

But as I said, my path has been about the people I’ve met along the way. It was for its people that I chose to go to Southwest Airlines to be head of litigation. Southwest is an airline that was founded by a lawyer (Herb Kelleher) who made it his mission to ‘democratize the skies’ in the US – to make it possible for everybody to be able to fly. I was fortunate to have been a part of that for over nine years.

The opportunity at Spirit AeroSystems arose, and again it was due to a prior relationship – somebody I worked for in the past recommended me for the job. Spirit was an opportunity to go from an airline to an air structures manufacturer, getting to be a part of a global business with operations in the UK, France and Malaysia, as well as multiple places in the US.

To come to the general counsel role was a big leap for me, and I was fortunate that in the past I had had a very diverse litigation practice that included, for example, corporate governance issues. Also, in private practice, I had worked as part of the defence team for CEO Kenneth Lay in the Enron litigation in the US, which was, of course, a huge changer of basic corporate governance tenets. At Southwest Airlines, I also got to do a lot of regulatory oversight, corporate investigations and the integration of another airline. All of those things were very helpful for prepping me for being GC, at least in terms of the legal role.

The best advice I could have given myself is that I don’t have to learn everything today.

But the biggest leap was the business, and going from an airline, which is essentially customer service, to aerospace and defence manufacturing. That was an enormous learning curve, and remains so. I read everything I could get my hands on before I got here about the industry. There were people within Spirit who I reached out to, to learn what we do and how we do it – for example, taking tours of our manufacturing facilities, walking through the plant floor to see what we make and talking to the people who make these aircraft structures, and also spending time digging in with our corporate controller to learn the very different financial and accounting aspects of a manufacturing business versus an airline.

At the time, the best advice I could have given myself is that I don’t have to learn everything today. In the first few months I was here, I felt that I needed to know everything right away and, in all of the work that I did trying to learn as much as I could, I neglected myself. Have a plan for all the learning that you need to do, but make sure you are making time to sleep. Taking the job meant moving my whole family to a new city. I have children, and I did not sufficiently take into account what that transition would be like for us on a personal level. So I think you have to learn that you don’t have to know it all on the first day. Have your plan and make sure you take care of yourself in the process.

The things that I find most rewarding really centre around people that I’ve had the privilege to lead who have gone on to do tremendous things in their careers or try new challenges. I’ve been most proud of the teams that I’ve put together and the smart people on those teams. On the flip side of that, the most challenging moments have been ‘people moments’ – learning how to adapt and work with people who don’t operate with the same core principles and values as I do. It’s really tough to stand on an island alone, but sometimes you have to do it. At Spirit, we’ve just begun the journey of shifting our culture and our values, so those most challenging moments are learning that not everybody yet has bought into those core values and principles, and having to learn how to influence people to get on board.

Fortunately, the single most valuable thing that contributed to my view of leadership was the leadership program that I went through at Southwest Airlines. I was actually the first lawyer to go through it, and it taught me the importance of having a core set of principles and values and instilling them in people across your business, so that everybody is operating from the same set of guidelines in making their business decisions. I think that’s no different from understanding your company’s risk appetite or strategy – if you don’t know what those things are, you don’t know the framework for the decisions that you need to make.

There are non-traditional legal service providers that you can couple with a law firm.

Since I’ve been here, I have expanded my leadership to our compliance team, I have taken on our global contracts team, and I will be taking on the information security team – the chief information security officer we’ve just hired will report to me. As you see the general counsel role expanding to really influence business strategy, I think it will also expand to have more leadership of some of these non-legal areas because of the interconnectedness of them. Most businesses will benefit from a general counsel who has some oversight and an intimate involvement with all those other foundational elements of the business.

There are other things throughout my career that helped prepare me for my job at Spirit. I had stepped into my role at Southwest Airlines at a time when e-discovery was just coming into effect, and so I was able to be pretty innovative in the leadership there in getting us to a sophisticated state in our litigation practice. Coming to Spirit, I would say I’m bringing innovation, but it’s not new things; all of the things that I did at Southwest I’m bringing here now. Spirit just hadn’t had the opportunity or the need to get current in the same way.

For example, I have started doing something that’s pretty common in our industry, but wasn’t common at Spirit, which is unbundling the legal services. We’re not hiring law firms for every aspect of a litigation matter or due diligence, for instance, because there are non-traditional legal service providers that you can couple with a law firm, which are a lot more cost-effective. We’re bringing in things like technology-assisted review and artificial intelligence, which started in e-discovery and now we’re expanding over into revamping our contracts management. If you can use tools like AI to help you gather more information about your state of compliance and contracts management, then you’re going to equip your lawyers to deliver much more efficient and practical legal advice.

I think this represents a broader trend. I’m surprised we still have as many very large law firms as we have. At Spirit, we do hire large multinational law firms, but I am personally a fan of smaller practices that I think deliver better value for the client, depending on the matter. There are times when you need a firm with a global presence, but I continue to believe that we’re going to see more boutique-style law firms that really understand their clients’ need for practical advice that furthers their business goal. And I really think we’re going to see more service providers in this area where we’ve unbundled various things. There are companies that are not law firms, but which have lawyers you can use on a project basis with your law firm partners on matters – sort of an ‘à la carte’ menu where you can piece together what you need. More law firms will, I hope, start to see the benefit of partnering with those non-traditional service providers.

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Tim Murphy, General Counsel, Mastercard

I joined Mastercard in 2000 and initially spent seven years in our law department. Then, I spent seven years or so in a series of business roles – I was chief of staff to our chief operating officer doing strategic work, financial planning and sales planning. It was a senior staff role, which is often how lawyers can move effectively from the legal function to the business side. From there, I went to run our North America markets, and for the first time I had a P&L and actual account responsibility, which is a bracing challenge for anybody, but particularly somebody coming from a legal background. Because I was deep in that market and understood some of our challenges, I was asked to take on the role of chief product officer, which tested me in a whole new way.

One of the strengths of Mastercard’s culture is that it seeks to move people around and give them diverse responsibilities, and I really was the beneficiary of that. I joke that I was qualified for exactly none of the jobs I had except for the first one! And in a strange way, all that moving around made me better qualified to be the general counsel.

So, coming back into a legal role did not feel like a significant leap, because I had both wide-ranging previous experience in legal and risk management, as well as having spent seven years with a lot of access to the board of directors and helping to drive the company’s business strategy. In the product organization I had been given the opportunity to manage a relatively large team, and so the opportunity to come back into the law organization and drive a focused transformation agenda was very exciting.

It goes without saying that in the GC role you need to really make sure you put on your risk management hat. That isn’t to say that I didn’t feel accountable for risk management in my business roles, but there’s a special accountability here, and trying to be intentional about flexing that muscle, consulting widely with people and using my business experience to advise on legal risk was a key part of my initial agenda as GC. These were all an important part of coming back in to the law department.

One of the things that I’ve found is that as in-house lawyers, we need to always be selling, meaning that we can’t take for granted that our colleagues understand or appreciate the critical work we do. Business people tend to communicate simply and crisply, whereas lawyers can, at times, go on forever. Just being able to talk to my own legal teams about things like simplicity of communication, managing to metrics and leaning into the company’s strategy has been a pleasure to bring to the department. You need to tell your colleagues it’s a priority: you need to get their buy-in and acknowledgement, so when you are successful it doesn’t look like a random walk, it looks like very important strategic work, which it in fact is. That is so foundational, but it so often doesn’t happen. In-house lawyers need to be selling their services and their value.

In-house lawyers need to be selling their services and their value.

We’ve really worked hard on a metrics-based scorecard of things we wanted to achieve – some strategic and some tactical. It is such a natural instinct for business leaders – every business leader manages to a P&L or some sort of balanced scorecard of hard numeric metrics. For lawyers, on the other hand, it is really hard, and a lot resist it. But at the end of the day, if you push hard enough, I think every legal function can find a metrics-based scorecard to measure themselves. That’s really powerful because it speaks the language of business, and it’s a great way of demonstrating value to your board, your CEO and others.

We are shifting a significant portion of our work from lawyers to a shared service function with our finance team. Now, at Mastercard, if you do a non-disclosure agreement with us, it’s done by staff in the shared service function, and that shared service function has all sorts of automation and it tracks – in a very rich way – timelines and response rates and so on. It has allowed us to use knowledge in entirely different ways. We are revamping all of our customer-onboarding systems to make them much more digital- and user-friendly, we’re bringing mobile-based solutions to all compliance requirements, and we’re really trying to show up as a mobile first, digital savvy organization. If Mastercard is going to grow 10, 15%, I want to be able to support that growth, but at the same time grow our expenses only by a very small fraction of that 10, 15%.

In a legal department, it’s very easy to revert to: I’m a service organization and I will do what the business brings me. That’s reactive. We have a critical role in driving company strategy: understanding that strategy, figuring out the components of it, influencing it, and finding ways for legal and policy and other things to not only enable the strategy, but to advance it.

‘I’ll give you an example. We’re increasingly seeing that good privacy policies are a competitive differentiator. In light of GDPR, my legal team has created a groundbreaking venture called Trūata – which is a method of anonymising data so that it can be used appropriately while protecting consumer privacy, consistent with the new regulations. It came about because lawyers went to the business and said, ‘Look, we have to do this but, by the way, we can get a competitive advantage if we do it well. Let’s drive this thing.’ This is an example of how, if you’re just an order-taker, marking up contracts, then you’re not doing all that you can do.

I think that there is growing demand for the GC to be a trusted adviser to boards. The GC must be the keeper and the guardian of the company’s ethics and its culture, including in areas well beyond its traditional remit. Being part of those conversations, always doing the right thing and absolutely insisting on good ethics and compliance are so important. We’ve seen how incredibly destructive some of these divisive cultural issues can be if they’re not managed the right way.

The GC must be the keeper and the guardian of the company’s ethics and its culture.

It’s really hard to overestimate how much time and effort goes into board and governance issues. That continues to surprise me, even four years into the role. Getting the narratives right to the board, not just on my own things, but helping the company do that well overall so that we have effective meetings and get to good conversations – boy, it’s time consuming. You’ve got to make sure you’re resourcing for it, because it can take over your role.

In my job, I could do nothing but government outreach and it still would be really hard to cover everything I need to. This aspect of the job is that important and demanding. Given the choppy geopolitical waters, it has never been more important to make sure you’re not just stuck in the office, but you’re out there talking to governments and stakeholders, you’re advocating and being an ambassador for the firm. The reality is that there are only a few people in an organization who can really get top engagement, and demands on GCs are increasingly high as a result.

In terms of the role of the GC going forward, I do think new skills may be needed on the external ambassadorship side. If you can give a good speech in a TED Talks style in front of 200 economists in a leading country and come off as pretty compelling, you’re adding value to your firm. The best skill you can ever get anywhere in life is public speaking. It’s not rocket science; being comfortable in a public role can be learned.

The world is going through enormous change, not just in technology, but also geopolitics. For multinational firms, from a regulatory and public policy standpoint, the future is going to be harder. Norms that have been around since the Second World War are really changing: Alliances are fracturing, we’re seeing trade issues; we’re seeing nationalism on the rise; prevalent data privacy issues. Societies are looking for private companies to take positions on social issues that are enormously complicated. So the job is harder than it’s been because of those things and I think we need new models and approaches to addressing them. Trying to do it alone isn’t likely to be successful. Being a GC, not in a steady state, or even in a growth state with known paradigms, but in a state where all the paradigms are being thrown up is difficult, and we need to do more work on our tools.

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Audrey Lee, General Counsel, Starz

I think that coming from an in-house role to the GC position is an easier transition than going directly from being a partner in a law firm, because the role is so different. Being the outside lawyer, you don’t have the perspective of the consigliere. Although folks can obviously be successful that way, I think that’s a bigger jump.

I would have loved to work in more industry sectors! But I think the unique thing about entertainment is that once you’ve started down that road, if you try to interview outside of the industry, there’s a lot of scepticism. People wonder why – it’s a desirable, sexy industry and people are more often trying to break into it rather than break out of it.

I have loved the job since I’ve been here because of the variety that it presents. One day I’m working on an FCC filing, the next day it’s a shareholder litigation, the next day it’s a big contract with our biggest licensing partner. I also like the opportunity to really feel like you are making an impact at the highest levels on the direction of the company – that’s something I hadn’t experienced before I became general counsel.

Just as I was starting the job, Starz went through something that was pretty unprecedented for the company – it was dropped from one of its distributors. Going through that entailed a lot of regulatory and political work, as well as transactional negotiations that was a huge challenge for me and for the rest of the company. Coming out of it with a deal was something that I’m proud we were able to achieve.

The general counsel position is in essence a generalist role. You’re not just the transactional lawyer, you’re also looking at litigation, regulatory issues, political issues, all of those things, and I don’t know that it’s very easy to get that experience prior to taking on the role. I was primarily a transactional lawyer – IP and entertainment – so I had done the corporate M&A stuff, the securities stuff, and also done IP and entertainment licensing and distribution, but I hadn’t done litigation. I had been involved, but I wasn’t the one leading litigation. I hadn’t done production work to the extent that I’m now responsible for. The best preparation you can do is to get involved in a lot of different things and try to get the broadest experience as you can. Even as a transactional lawyer, I would support litigation, which was useful experience.

As soon as you’ve mastered something, it’s time to move on and get some other experience.

When I was at Sony, I had been doing a certain type of entertainment work; I was good at it and it was my area of expertise. But after five plus years of doing that, I obviously wasn’t learning as much – it was like the back of my hand. I was looking around at other opportunities within the company and somebody advised me to consider another area in order to get experience I didn’t have. My response was: ‘Yeah, I’d be willing to try that, but I wouldn’t want to give up what I have now.’ I wanted to take on new things, but I didn’t want to let go of what I had.

The person wisely said: ‘You already know that stuff, it’s on your résumé, nobody can take that away from you. Everybody will know that you are an expert in that stuff after having done it for five or six years, so it’s ok for you to let that go in order to take on other responsibilities – and it will be better for your career growth.’ He really encouraged me to let go and make room for new things, and I thought that was really great advice. As soon as you’ve mastered something, it’s time to move on and get some other experience.

I’ve always told my teams, whether it was at Sony Pictures, Lionsgate or at Starz, that we need to advise the business not just from a legal standpoint, but from a strategic standpoint. When you think about a contract, the parts that are purely legal are all pretty boilerplate and a very small part. Our role is to bring up all of the concerning business points that might come up in a contract: does it really make sense for this agreement to be non-exclusive, does that fit with our strategy? Does it make sense for this to be a long-term deal? Maybe we want more flexibility to do this other thing next year? It’s really advising on the business strategy and what you see coming up in the future to help them achieve their business goals. I feel like I’ve been doing that since I started being a business lawyer and this is just a little bit more official now that I am general counsel.

I’d like to think that there was a move towards having more women in the GC role. I don’t know if I would say that mentoring and nurturing of diverse attorneys is increasing in the entertainment industry, but the Weinstein scandal may bring on some change. Maybe it will make women feel a little bit more emboldened to speak out about the need for diversity in the workplace – they can now point to that, so it doesn’t have to be so personal. Companies are letting go of people for all sorts of reasons related to the Weinstein issue, and it’s exciting to see that change is happening. I don’t know if it’s going to be sustainable, but there’s definitely more awareness and sensitivity than there ever has been before.