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?  

Managing legal aspects during periods of instability requires a multi-dimensional approach, and a need to emphasise some aspects that are already required when times are calmer. 

Keep your ears to the ground; whether it is regulatory developments, government announcements, competitors’ moves or your own firm’s adaptations, instability brings a lot of changes that often happen at the same time. Legal teams cannot afford to miss these changes if they wish to remain trusted advisors to their company and not lose touch with reality. This is even more important as the solutions are usually not boiler-plate answers and require creative thinking. Therefore, staying well informed is absolutely critical.  

Fostering collaboration with other departments – predominantly compliance and risk management – is essential to cover all aspects of the issues and bring coordinated responses. It also allows legal teams to test their ideas before going out to the business for implementation.  

Ensure maximum communication. As lawyers we are very good at dealing with complex situations and coming up with smart and detailed solutions. In this exercise, we sometimes fail to realise that everything we do must translate in tangible results that are aligned with the firm’s strategy. In periods of instability, the risk of disconnect increases because the needs are changing rapidly and the nuances we bring are not necessarily understood. Consequently, extra care must be given to the way we communicate.  

What measures has your company taken to embed sustainability practices into its core business operations, and how does the role of the general counsel contribute to driving and ensuring sustainable practices within the company?  

Being a privately held company for more than 200 years, sustainability has always been on the company’s agenda. With the recent wave of regulatory developments and stakeholders’ requests, we have been working on several dimensions: 

Communication: Sustainability has always been embedded in the company’s strategy, but we did not necessarily have to explain it in detail. A lot of what we were doing was natural and sort of “under the radar”. For example, our headquarters was already extremely efficient, but we did not actively communicate on it. The same was true for our investment activities. Hence, one of our first initiatives has been to gather all our sustainability practices and properly communicate on them, predominantly internally.  

Strategy: In 2020, Pictet defined seven strategic ambitions. Creating a more responsible economy is one of them, with three distinct objectives: to significantly reduce the environmental impact of our activities and investments; fully integrate ESG factors and active ownership into all investment processes; and be a leading provider of responsible products and solutions. We have embedded these ambitions in our core business operations, essentially through a decentralised governance, which is nurtured and supported by a strong and compact central ESG team.  

Regulatory compliance: The financial industry is being hit with an unprecedented wave of regulatory developments. As general counsel, I am part of the core team that looks after all initiatives of Pictet Asset Management in the area of sustainability from a regulatory perspective. In this capacity, I ensure not only compliance, but also long-term robustness, to avoid the business getting trapped in short term constraints.