Team size: Five

What has been the number one challenge that has impacted you over the past year?

The number one ongoing challenge for us definitely lies in the current economic conditions and the escalation of costs that has forced companies to reinvent the ways they do business to protect their margins. This does not only lead to an increase of customer and supplier disputes, but also to the abandonment of existing legal frameworks and internal processes. As a legal department, it’s important we protect the business from unreasonable claims while finding new ways to approach the market in full legal compliance. Although it’s very challenging and not often ideal for the organisation, this time is also intellectually stimulating for legal counsels.

Do you have an example of a time when you have come up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works that did not result in a large expense?

In our mission to standardise and digitalise services, we decided to invest in the creation of an internal legal client portal (the Legal HUB) that acts as a one-stop shop for legal information. It concerns a Sharepoint-based website built in collaboration with our Sharepoint experts in the Global Service Center. Within the Legal HUB, our department makes available off-the-shelf advice, legal frameworks, trainings, standardised processes with fixed milestones and easy-to-use templates. Both the business and the legal department itself benefit from the Legal HUB. It offers the business easy and immediate access to legal information while simultaneously decreasing the number of legal requests and repetitive questions for the legal department.

A second and very interesting solution we built together with the corporate affairs team is an AI tool that validates our trade marketing materials and smaller marketing campaigns. The legal and corporate affairs team translated the legal marketing requirements and code of conduct into a set of rules that were subsequently coded into an AI-based tool used to scan materials for incompliances. The investment was rather limited and it now allows the marketing teams to work autonomously as they can approve their own campaigns through the tool.

What would you say are the unique qualities required to be successful as an in-house lawyer in your industry?

For the in-house lawyer, hard skills are just as important as soft skills and it is essential to find a good balance between the two sets. It might sound traditional, but legal expertise is the number one quality for success as an in-house lawyer and is of prime importance if the organisation is to be confident in your judgment. Of course, having legal expertise alone is far from sufficient. Bright ideas must lead to effective solutions and for this purpose one must have (i) a good understanding of the functioning of the organisation and (ii) a solution-oriented, pragmatic mindset to translate ideas into actionable solutions.

A soft skill that is often underestimated in the legal field is good communication. It is reflected in active listening when talking to your team and the wider business, but also in sharing knowledge and information with other departments and in managing your stakeholders well. Especially in larger organisations, this may sometimes pose a challenge.

Finally, in times of digital revolution, it is important for legal counsels to be tech-savvy and data-driven. As a legal department, you cannot stand still while the organisation you are part of is in a full digital transformation. As companies are becoming more and more data-driven, they will expect their legal departments to have the data available with which to structure themselves and base its decisions on.