Team size: 6

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

The MROH legal department was created at the end of 2019. Before that, all legal matters of MRO Holdings were managed by different external law firms. The process of creating the team was finalised in the following months and we went through a slow process of letting the organisation get to know us and aligning legal matters for review. Following the completion of this, the demand for legal services over the last year has been very high and the requirement for specialised counsel across different fields grew rapidly as we became responsible for legal matters across all of the organisation’s jurisdictions.

In which ways have you attempted to bring the legal department closer to your business colleagues?

The first thing I try to do every day is create a culture among my department wherein we are all ‘team players’ with the other areas of the company. To achieve this, we aim to understand the business needs through constant communication with our business colleagues, we try to communicate our shared concerns through a legal perspective, and we work to find solutions together and take decisions as a team, managing and balancing any related risks. We also have a bi-weekly internal training program where a leader from different area of the company explains to the legal team the role of their department in the organisation, the challenges they have, and their plans for the year. We are in a highly technical business and these meetings help us to be better prepared to support the plans of different company sectors.