How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crises, and how does your legal strategy align with the broader business strategy to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

Management of instability: In the current age of geopolitical tensions and geoeconomic “lawfare”, the work of an inhouse team has become more challenging, but also more interesting. We need to constantly adapt to regulatory changes, new trade measures, and volatile economic conditions. This requires a dedicated team of versatile and proactive inhouse counsel, compliance, and export control professionals.

My key role is to put the right people in the right position, to empower them and to give them the management backing they need to protect Airbus’ interests in this VUCA-world. We seek to hire lawyers who are adaptable and understand that part of their job is to manage and balance risks, recognising that the “right” legal answer is often elusive or imperfect. Beyond our own teams, it is increasingly essential to have not only the right legal experts around the table, but key business functions as well, such as procurement or operations, as today’s crises are often mostly “operational”, and often linked to our supply chain. To achieve effective risk mitigation, the lawyers’ advocacy has to be enriched by the contributions made by the business people around us.

In the recent crises Airbus has faced in its supply chain, be it due to difficulties with key suppliers, or to sanctions on critical components previously sourced from countries now subject to sanctions in the wake of the Ukraine war, we have demonstrated that we are capable of steering the company through legal and regulatory pitfalls together with our partners in the business. Learning from these past crises is crucial preparation for the next one, as in each crisis we enrich our playbook for the future.

Strategy alignment between legal and the business: When speaking to my team, I often stress that our mission is to protect Airbus’ “licence to operate”. This means that our legal strategy should be tailored to protect and support the company’s commercial objectives. As a team, we do this in a variety of ways, including supporting the negotiation of purchase agreements for aircraft and defence products, protecting our intellectual property, or defending the business against claims.  In turn, our business colleagues are aware that their commercial decisions can have legal implications and that they need to ensure alignment with our legal strategy (e.g. through the avoidance of business dealings with sanctioned countries). To gain their trust and ensure that they involve us early on, we must be concise and pragmatic, always demonstrating that we understand and help the business. 

In that context, and to provide end-to-end support to the business from the legal analysis of new regulation to the required lobbying effort to defend our company interest, we have integrated the Public Affairs function at Airbus into my Legal and Compliance organisation in 2024. We already see the benefits of this integration.

What emerging technologies do you see as having the most significant impact on the legal profession in the near future, and how do you stay updated on these developments?

AI will have a significant impact on our ways of working and will become a very powerful tool to reduce administrative and routine tasks for inhouse counsel. AI will allow our teams to focus on the critical legal and strategic questions.  

We have already embarked on the transformation of our work with the creation of our own data analysis centre using the then-cutting edge “smart review” technology to automate and expedite the review of immense amounts of data (which would have taken decades to review without technological assistance). We are now leveraging this experience to establish an internal data centre using cutting-edge software with a new internal data analytics team based in Portugal, thus achieving cost effectiveness and skills building for the future.

Beyond this concrete example, we are already testing different AI applications in our daily work, and are monitoring the market for software to further leverage the advantages of AI. I am regularly briefed by our experts from the legal digital teams on these developments.