As the Luxembourg head of legal of RSA, one of the world’s leading insurance groups, Simon Baker has shown great ability to handle large scale projects in a very complex cross-border environment, such as internal mergers, restructuring, Brexit and post-Brexit matters, and much more His technical know-how and deep commitment have proven to be a real asset for the firm.

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

Resource challenge.

The competitive market for legal professionals, particularly in Belgium, has continued to impact our ability to recruit into our team. So, working with good local partner law firms, we have developed a mixture of onsite, and virtual secondment options to provide cover where full-time resources remain to be recruited. The value to us is we get the professional, legal support we need (often at a fixed price), whilst our partner firms become embedded in our teams, and get to understand our business and our risk appetite. Across Benelux, we have developed in-depth relationships with law firms, who are able to provide good quality lawyers to act as in-house secondees, helping us bridge the resource challenge.

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?

Over the last 12 months, we have centralised a number of functions both within the legal team, and more broadly across our business. Our company secretariat function, which is part of the legal team, now produces all documentation required for local regulatory filings across our six European branches and our head office. Filing continues to be done on a local basis, but supporting documentation production is now centralised to reduce costs. This has resulted in a de-duplication of efforts (particularly on notarisation and translation), and a smoother more timely filing process. Separately, the development of a centralised legal guidance production (particularly for EU wide legislation, or for legal documents which are broadly similar across the EU – for example non-disclosure agreements) has allowed local lawyers to review documents more quickly and apply a common position across our geographic footprint.

Finally, we have driven a review of legal service providers with our new procurement team during 2023 which has sought to apply new ways of working, with fixed or capped fees, additional benefits and training and closer collaboration with our Benelux partner firms, reducing our top line legal spend whilst increasing the benefits for both us and our panel firms.

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

Remembering to look at the broader picture, understanding the issues presenting themselves and working through innovative ways to solve them. Too many lawyers simply answer the question that’s asked. A good in-house lawyer will answer the question succinctly (albeit not necessarily with an answer the business wants). An excellent in-house lawyer takes a step back and finds a solution which allows the business to achieve its goals, with context and will also look at the broader landscape. That might not be the way the business initially envisaged doing it, but the in-house lawyer will have found a route which achieves largely the same result. In a highly regulated area like insurance, knowing how regulation is applied, and knowing how to steer a path towards achieving business aims, whilst being compliant, is key. Telling the business what the regulations say is not being a good in-house lawyer. Its is about finding the legally compliant solution and looking at the larger issue, and advising on that.