Could you share an example of a time when you came up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works and did not come at a large expense?

Our business relies on a massive number of service agreements with health care professionals, for continued education activities. Leveraging on linguistics, technology, design-thinking principles, and the voice-of-the-customer, we developed simplified contractual arrangements, enabling agility in the development of educational activities, and cutting by 75% the time required by health care professionals the reading and signing process.

Can you foresee any key developments to the way general counsel work over the next five years?

I anticipate three key developments in the way we work for the years ahead:

Our value proposition as attorneys is evolving. The speed and breadth of regulatory shifts coupled with general economic uncertainty will drive legal expertise to the side in favour of skills that allow rapid issue exploration, learning on the fly, and the ability to deliver sound legal advice to partners with clients in navigating complex environments.

From an operational perspective, legal operations will play a bigger role as a partner enabler of speed, transparency, and efficiency; in order to enhance decision-making capabilities, general counsel and legal departments need skills and capabilities to support technology decisions, collect the right data to facilitate day-to-day decision-making, manage outside counsel management, foster operational efficiency, and continuous improvement.

Finally, from a talent development point of view, focus will move away from building and developing legal and operational expertise in our teams, towards the development of strong managerial capabilities and partnership skills. This means having attorneys that can manage legal matters, in multidisciplinary environments, with a focus on driving business outcomes.

How do you prioritise diversity and inclusion within your legal department, and what initiatives have you implemented to foster a more inclusive and equitable work environment?

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is not treated as a trend or business objective, but embedded into everything we do. In staffing processes, a diverse slate of candidates is always precondition; this includes not only having 50% or more women as candidates, but also ensuring that there are diverse backgrounds, universities, and personal styles represented in the slate. The outside counsel management process is another example of how we embed DEI principles into everything we do: over 80% of the work sent outside goes to small law offices (firms with three to ten employees), including several women-owned firms, that can deliver excellent value for their work with deep legal expertise.

What is a cause, business-related or otherwise, you are passionate about, and why?

I am passionate about talent development and actively working to inspire my team and colleagues, inside and outside of the legal department, to always be their best in serving our business, our customers, and the communities in which we operate. I strongly believe that individually we have the power to make our world better and that when we all come together, the possibilities are extraordinary.