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?

We aim to employ a proactive, adaptable, and collaborative approach to managing legal aspects during crises. It is important to prepare before the storm, to establish contingency plans, risk assessments, and response frameworks, ultimately ensuring our legal strategies support business continuity and resilience. Having a confident understanding of the company’s obligations to customers, suppliers, and other parties, including across business lines, in advance, is needed to be able to react quickly when a crisis situation presents itself. While a plan of action is fundamental, it is also important to have the rapport and shared trust with the business to react flexibly and collaboratively to unpredictable situations in a way that prioritises operational continuity and safeguards the organisation’s reputation. Responding well to a crisis situation can strengthen business relationships and earn trust with the company’s customers and partners.

In your opinion, what are the main trends affecting your work now?

For a global organisation of size it is critical to leverage technology to ensure accurate records, enforce internal approval processes, maintain playbooks, and promote consistency among varied teams. The modern business environment requires quick input from legal with consistent quality that adds value. Legal technology tools such as CLM systems and AI are advancing rapidly and can be greatly beneficial for these purposes.

Regulations, especially regarding data privacy, security, operational resilience, and compliance, are becoming more intensive in many jurisdictions globally and require legal teams to navigate this matrix of emerging standards and frameworks.

Shifting policies, including proposed policies, on matters such as trade, sanctions, tariffs and international cooperation, have the potential to impact cross-border operations and require legal attention.

What strategic priorities are guiding your legal team into 2025?

Looking forward into 2025 we are prioritising: leveraging technology tools, including AI, to improve efficiency, consistency, and transparency, as well as enabling deeper analytics and improved risk management; staying ahead of regulatory changes and amplifying compliance functions to keep up with ever more complex global regulatory and compliance demands; developing and upskilling talent to prepare for emerging changes and supporting new strategic business initiatives; overall, we are emphasising fostering agility with resilience – supporting the business with a strategically aligned legal department to position our organisation for continued success in an unpredictable environment.