| MetLife
MetLife
‘Cross-functional team work’ is what comes to John O’Halloran (Metlife’s head of legal for EMEA)’s mind when discussing successful collaboration and internal innovation. ‘We continuously seek to improve and standardise ways of engaging with our business partners’, he explains. ‘We work across multiple jurisdictions so we need to provide consistency on how we engage’. Undoubtedly the most significant project that the team has been working on came to a culmination in 2016 with the completion of the restructuring of MetLife’s European Insurance business. When discussing this – which O’Halloran describes as ‘one of the largest reorganisations of its type in Europe’ – he says, ‘it was achieved through good cross-functional cooperation and coordination, effective project management and regulatory engagement at a senior level over the course of approximately five years’. Enjoying a highly collaborative internal team culture, which is solutions-focused, O’Halloran states that personnel development is key to the team’s success. ‘Metlife has an expansive legal affairs mentoring programme for its lawyers, aimed at developing an understanding of Metlife and their role within it. Overall, we want to provide opportunities to our lawyers and push them to consistently expand their skills’, he concludes.
