About

What are the most important transactions and litigations that you have been involved in during the last two years?

For the last two years we have had a tremendous number of various interesting projects. They were laying in the orporate law sphere, like new charter creation due to a new LLC law adoption in Ukraine, investment and dividends payments project, participation in global M&A project with one of our main competitors, various innovative products launches, continuous digitalisation, simplification and improvement of daily legal work and even complicated compliance investigation.

What changes have you made to the workings of the legal department during your time in your current role? How has that affected the wider company?

Personally, I believe that if you work inside
of the business – you should deliver business solutions. Otherwise you will be useless tool in complicated “business construction”. Thus, my team divides responsibilities by products, projects or business orientation. For example one legal counsel is responsible for the construction business, the other – for digital in all four business units, a third one leads a global project, etc. Such an approach gives my people an opportunity for deepening knowledge of business processes, enhancing their holistic view and expanding professional areas of expertise. I hardly encourage my team members to participate in external professional and business conferences and events. We are working not only internally like ordinary legal in-house representatives, but we are also messengers and ambassadors of the corporate culture to the outer world. Plus we use such opportunities to share our best experience and practices with market peers and state authorities. We also practice short-term assignments in other Henkel local law departments in different locations, as well as at headquarters, and our obligatory soft-skill trainings allow us to develop manager and leadership skills, and a wide range of other competencies. As a result – the business considers and treats legal team as a trustful business partner, who is able to deliver effective solutions and sustainable results, even in tough situations.

What are the most important considerations you have when recruiting new team members?

I always consider two important things when I talk to potential candidates for my team: the desire to work and ability to think. Digitalisation of the world transformed human nature from researchers to surfers. The content attracts people’s attention more than the sound meaning. In our environment we do often face the situation when the youngest (unfortunately) do not understand what they want. How can I help a person to develop and grow, if he/she does not want to do it personally? It means, I will waste my and my peers time, emotions and energy! Life is too short to throw time away for non-valuable spending.

If you had to give advice to an aspiring in-house lawyer or GC what would it be and why?

I use three rules in my life: See the goal, believe in yourself and disregard the obstacles.

What do you feel are the pros and cons of an in-house legal role compared to a private practice one?

In my opinion, in-house counsel have more opportunities to have a balanced life. Plus, the specifics of our work means that we are generalists (as opposed to the private practice lawyers, who have a niche expertise), we live in business and take care of a whole product “life-cycle”. We are even not limited with legal topics. In order to be useful for the business, we must develop ourselves in various spheres, gain other knowledge, such as in finance, logistics, sales, marketing, IT etc. This not only broadens our outlook, but preserves us from early burn-out and a tiredness of profession.

FOCUS ON… DIGITAL

The future of in-house in a digital world.

Do we have the future in our/for our/of our profession? Will artificial intelligence substitute us in full scope? How do we survive in an overloaded information space?

We are not able to envisage whole picture for hereafter, but we may prepare, train and develop our “brain and skills” muscles.

The digital revolution has opened up an opportunity for us to know and discover everything immediately. Instead of deep analysis and research of the truth we are surfing for short, flashing and sometimes shocking news and we misuse our ability for evolution. Humans need hours to take a decision while robots or computers spend several seconds to deliver the outcome.

How to keep a leadership role in such a challenging fight? We should remember, that people created robots and computers. They are our supporters
and assistants, not substitutions (to some extent). But human still take decisions, invent, feel, love, give birth, make mistakes, lose and rule the world. We should not shift all of our tasks into technical hands, but to smartly simplify the repeatable and boring processes. For example, a chatbot may become our best friend when we need to quickly analyse tonnes of legal documents. Moreover, we all have to keep cleaning and refreshing our brains – make info detox from info-garbage, socialise, spend time with our families and friends and harmonise with nature. Time to time, we should stop ourselves from wishing to take gadgets and to feed our curiosity, to switch off info greed for useless info occasions. It will give us precious time and energy for future creation and innovation. The legal counseling is one of the most creative processes in our life (to my opinion). If somebody objects my statement by saying that art, music and theater are main creative spheres – I will agree. However! One moment we are legal artists at “courts theater” playing an attorney role. During the next moment – we are scientists in implementation and usage of new technology.

Furthermore, each situation of in-house client is unique and requires our creative mind and individual non-standard human approach. It needs to be separately analysed, discussed, digested and lived through. Only after that we are able to deliver solid and valuable legal advice and support.

Still we are humans, not machines!