What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

As an internal legal team, we frequently manage confidential issues. However, I believe the most relevant topics are related to be close to the operational teams and help the business go further. I strongly believe an internal counsel must deeply understand their business to be able to give the best possible advice.

At Kinross, we successfully manage (and had positive outcomes) on a serial of lawsuits and were able to reduce and control contingency.

A challenge for 2023, it is the implementation of a legal software. Throughout the years, we have seen an increase of lawsuits as well as we had some significant changes in the team and a lot of information were lost.

How important is choosing to work with external lawyers who align with your company’s values? Are you likely to reconsider what firms you work with based on this?

Choosing external lawyers is extremely important. The values should be aligned, and trustfulness is key! I would reconsider a firm which values are not aligned as I also believe mismatch values directly affects trust relationship.

As we live in a fast-paced world today, what skills will a corporate legal team need to succeed in the modern in-house industry?

In my view, corporate counsel needs to build business skills – deeply understand the business (ups and downs), the market it is inserted in, and how their advice can impact operation (whatever it is). In law school, we don’t learn how our opinion can impact the client life, and as part of the business this understanding is very important. Also, I believe we should use less legal vocabulary when giving advice, so we can make ourselves more understandable and translate what external counsel (usually the experts on a specific issue) are saying.