Legal team size: 580-600

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?

Good legal departments can react quickly and calmly in periods of instability and crises. Great legal teams manage regularly with a calm sense of urgency that enables accelerated execution in two ways: (i) ongoing measurement of what matters to overall financial and operating success for the company embeds the legal team into the fabric of decision-making within the business, and (ii) aligning legal strategies with business strategies through common objectives and key results forces the legal team to only consider their work successful when the business wins the right way. I strive for alignment with our legal team’s objectives and those of the business across the globe and regularly measure our effectiveness through reviews with my leadership team. We force ourselves to measure progress on business strategies, not just legal ones. This empowers our teams to force proactive discussions with their internal business partners to unlock potential and accelerate execution.

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

The main trends I see that affect my work are increasing regulations/strict scrutiny. Regulations impacting how we deliver solutions and products are increasing in complexity and scope globally. Often, there is a lack of harmonisation across regions and so our team must navigate how we comply and continue to deliver where our customers have increased their expectations of suppliers as well.

In 2024, over half of the world’s population voted in significant elections. The results are being seen both in how countries engage in cross-border business and what policies will dictate how receptive they are to the growth of foreign businesses on their soil. Our teams are actively engaged both on the legal compliance front and the government relations front.

As a company, we have one balanced scorecard measuring our operational and financial performance together with our ability to deliver for our customers with an inclusive, diverse and engaged workforce. Aligning our legal objectives with the balanced scorecard simplifies our objectives but increases interdependencies with other functions and business groups to ensure we are doing all we can to achieve or exceed our targets. Holding ourselves accountable to one scorecard is hard for a function that does not own decision-making on business performance, but it fosters a common mindset of winning the right way.

We are focused on modernising our support of the business by (i) developing and implementing a cohesive technology roadmap across the legal department, and (ii) upskilling our team members to understand how things like artificial intelligence mixed with human intelligence simplify our workstreams and improve the quality of our solutions.

What strategic priorities are guiding your legal team into 2025?

We’re aiming to be aligned across the following pillars: financial, operational and people and planet.

In the legal department, we measure our ability to accelerate solutions with our customers (legal scorecards for our top customers), deliver solutions within our legal budget (including bringing more work in-house and lowering outside counsel spend where possible), and modernising our solutions to deliver a better rate of return on our solutions (i.e. improve turn-around time and reduce complexity with external partners)

We also aim to achieve operating performance goals and measure legal performance by how successful we are at accelerating the achievement of these objectives. We drive engagement and development across the legal team, advance our sustainability efforts and advance diversity and inclusion across the legal team.