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

In view of operating in a VUCA world with extremely dynamic external environment and considering a renewed ambition and strategy of the Bekaert group, we embarked last year on a transformation of the legal function towards the next level of maturity required to grasp opportunities and cope with challenges presented by this environment. An external benchmark and internal assessment helped to provide us input on where we stood, and jointly as a team we defined an ambition on where we want to be around six core pillars (strategy, people and organisation, service delivery, governance and compliance, processes, and technology) and a roadmap on how we intend to achieve such ambition. Every member of the team is leading or contributing to workstreams on our journey.

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?

As part of our legal transformation, we created a ‘legal operations’ role within our team, which has been taken up by one of our high-potential lawyers, and will help to guide us as a team through the legal transformation, by focusing on the key processes which we need to put in place or improve, in order to enable the lawyers to spend their time on the highest value or risk matters. A key priority for this year within this is the establishment of a Contract Lifecycle Management program, to optimise the end-to-end process from contract generation to rights management.

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

I consider active listening one of the most critical leadership skills of an in-house lawyer. It starts by inquiring and simply asking questions; I am always positively surprised how open and keen people generally are to share their insights, and am also not concerned about asking the most basic questions. And then to focus on listening (not just hearing) what others have to say; trying to understand and learn, gathering different perspectives outside your frame of reference, and withholding judgment. It helps to build connections with yourself, with your own team, with the business, with peers outside your company, and with other stakeholders in a broader ecosystem. It helps to build trust and a psychologically safe environment where failure is an opportunity to learn. And it strengthens your confidence to operate outside your comfort zone to identify risks and grasp opportunities together in a VUCA world.