What are the most significant cases or transactions that you have recently been involved in?

My responsibilities include all our global strategy and M&A initiatives. The most complex projects I have supported are confidential. However, public projects include the carve-out and divestiture of our LTL business unit, UPS Freight; the launch of our domestic small package joint venture in India, MOVIN; the 15-jurisdiction acquisition of healthcare logistics provider Bomi; the digital-oriented acquisitions of Roadie and Delivery Solutions; and investments by our corporate venture capital arm in exciting nascent spaces such as drones, robotics, and autonomous vehicles. Our M&A activity really covers the waterfront in terms of transactional type and complexity. It is a lean team that, in addition to executing on our company’s inorganic strategy, operates as an internal think tank and SWAT team for our company’s most challenging projects.

In general, what would you like to see change about the external law firms you use?

Speaking generally, many firms are stuck selling solutions to yesterday’s needs. They spend too much time and effort on the solution space, and not enough on the need space. Said differently, firms need to go deeper in understanding their customers’ needs at an individual level before pitching solutions which may or may not address the true needs. This principle applies in a host of different areas, including the nature (and speed of delivery) of work product, communication with and time management of the client, billing solutions, ESG, or even the potentially adverse impact of stress and sleep deprivation on timekeepers’ productivity and quality of decision-making.

As we enter the next decade, what skills will a corporate legal team need to succeed in the modern in-house industry?

First and foremost, a good heuristic is for in-house lawyers to view themselves fundamentally as businesspersons. The best in-house lawyers craft strategy and solve business problems that simply happen to have a legal dimension to them. Their approach is less myopically mitigating risk and more maximising risk-adjusted returns to the enterprise. Granted, imperfect incentive alignment (along with a host of other challenges) can interfere with this goal, but it is still useful to have as your North Star.

Second, my sense is that every in-house group is being asked to do more with less, and that this trendline is only going to steepen. Therefore, in-house legal departments must devise ways to optimise workflows to get work to the right resources. In practice, this could mean that much day-to-day support becomes self-service, which may require getting comfortable with a different risk profile than the historic approach. In other cases, it may mean strategic insourcing or even ceasing to provide certain categories of support that are high intensity but ultimately low impact. While bet-the-company matters will probably always require external firm engagement, both from a skillset and variable cost perspective, firms will need to evolve their value propositions and billing solutions to remain competitive even for high value and complexity matters like M&A.