About

Team size: Global team of 40. The global Legal, Commercial and Compliance function is over 250

What are the most important transactions, litigations or other major projects that you have been involved in during the last year?

The legal team is primarily transactional and focuses on supporting the growth of Fujitsu’s IT outsourcing business, which this year has included a wide range of corporate and IT outsourcing transactions. Routine transaction sizes range from £1m up to deals in excess of £200m, within both the private and public sector. Personally, I have been focused on driving our global digital transformation to enable the function to maximise its impact, and deliver its services faster and with the data needed to make insightful and risk optimised decisions.

What were the main difficulties your company faced during the initial Covid-19 lockdown?

As a technology company, we were fortunate that Fujitsu was able to quickly adapt to everyone working remotely. Culturally we were also familiar with this way of working as it has always been supported in the legal team as part of our drive to maintain a diverse and supportive working environment. However, we had to react rapidly to an increase in workload from customers needing urgent support to adapt their IT environments, and to those customers whose financial circumstances had changed. The key focus was on keeping the team aligned, informed and feeling supported, whilst also enabling our services to the wider business to continue uninterrupted.

Your company has recently seen mainstream news coverage for its AI products. Do you use AI solutions within your legal team and, more broadly, what are some of the developments in AI that you are most excited about?

We use a number of AI solutions which are developed by a group of legal engineers and operations analysts in the global legal services team, a team which I have established within the last two years. Our focus is on using AI to augment the skills and experience of our lawyers to further scale their impact, insight and effectiveness. In the last year our most significant development was a risk assessment tool capable of producing highly bespoke risk reports for complex IT outsourcing transactions. I instigated and designed the tool in response to the challenge of ensuring we were taking consistent and market sensitive risk positions across our global teams.

NLP technologies provide the most exciting opportunities for our team. Our lawyers work almost exclusively on customer documents; however, these complex and highly individual documents are difficult for the current AI technology to process. The further we can push NLP technologies, the more sophisticated the legal technology solutions we can develop.

Did the Brexit deal reached at the end of 2020 give you and your business greater clarity for the future?

The uncertainty of Brexit created significant challenges, but the impact on data transfers was the key concern given the nature of our business. To mitigate the risk, we consistently planned for a no-deal. We developed a bespoke global data transfer framework, supported by online portals and automated workflows, to track, manage and document data transfers. As well as providing business resilience during Brexit, the system has allowed us to respond to other challenges in this area, such as Schrems II and the introduction of new standard clauses by the EU. Throughout this period we worked closely with our senior leadership and customer team to ally concerns and respond to the changing political landscape. The conclusion of the Brexit deal provided welcome clarity, and a number of positive commercial opportunities.

How have you and your team found working from home, and is this a work practice you intend to carry forward post-pandemic? How important is face-to-face interaction for a legal team to function well?

The ability to work from home has been crucial to maintaining business continuity whilst giving individuals the best opportunity to balance the challenges the pandemic has brought to their personal lives. Our focus now is on how to ensure the team remains a dynamic and energising place to work whilst still offering flexibility in working environment. I have always supported working from home, and will continue to do so, but the pandemic has highlighted the real value in face-to-face interaction. It has given an opportunity to consider how to focus and maximise that benefit when we are able to return to offices. I will never mandate office attendance, but want to move towards an environment where people choose to be amongst the team in the office where they can, but still feel included and valued when working from home.