General counsel | Siili Solutions
Taru Kovanen
General counsel | Siili Solutions
What are the projects that you are most proud of working on over the past 12 months?
The implementation of the CSRD and the development of Siili Solutions Plc’s first sustainability report, set for publication in the first quarter of 2025, has been both an extensive and meaningful project to lead. It has required significant effort from both internal and external stakeholders. On a personal level, it has been a deeply rewarding deep dive into an entirely new domain, one in which I had no prior experience.
Siili Solutions Plc recently renewed its strategy, with more than 100 Siilis participating in the process. I had the privilege of contributing to multiple roles and from different perspectives: as secretary in board strategy sessions, as an employee in the strategy workshops, and within the communications stream from an investor relations perspective.
Following the release of the new AI-focused strategy, my focus has been on creating and implementing a robust and effective AI compliance framework within Siili Group. This has been a truly collaborative effort, bringing business and legal teams together to work towards a shared goal, ensuring that our AI offering is sustainable, responsible, and ethical. I am immensely proud to be building a strategic foundation that affects everyone in the organisation while also creating added value for our clients.
I was also involved in the acquisition of a majority stake in the Finnish company Integrations Group Oy. With my career background in M&A, I always find corporate acquisitions particularly exciting and rewarding.
How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis to ensure the organisation’s resilience?
Managing legal aspects during periods of instability requires a delicate balance between legal compliance and recognising the fundamentally human nature of crisis response. I strongly believe that organisational resilience stems primarily from people’s ability to navigate uncertainty. How people interpret, communicate, and act upon legal guidance, or any other guidance, ultimately determines success in crisis situations. Therefore, I believe it is crucial to approach legal crisis management with both analytical rigour and emotional intelligence.
My strategy revolves around three pillars: clarity, communication, and accountability. First, uncertainty and crisis situations call for clarity and fact-based decision-making. This means creating clear documentation and decision trees while maintaining flexibility to address unique human circumstances. Second, transparency is key. Consistent and open communication, along with timely and accurate information, helps build clarity and a sense of security. Implementing transparent communication channels ensures that legal guidance reaches all stakeholders in an accessible and understandable way. Third, I aim to maintain a focus on accountability while acknowledging that crises often require rapid adaptation and learning from experience.
My approach places strong emphasis on human resilience alongside legal resilience. During periods of instability, I trust in actively supporting the human capital that drives organisational recovery. This means providing clear, practical guidance while remaining sensitive to the stress and uncertainty that crises create.
Moreover, I believe that maintaining emotional intelligence in legal crisis management significantly enhances organisational resilience. By acknowledging the human impact of decisions while providing clear legal frameworks, we build trust and encourage more effective compliance. This balanced approach helps prevent the paralysis that can occur when organisations focus solely on legal risk without considering human factors.
In practice, this means developing crisis response protocols that are both legally robust and humanly manageable, creating communication strategies that address both legal requirements and emotional needs, and fostering a culture where legal compliance and human understanding go hand in hand.
Based on your experiences in the past year, are there any trends in the legal or business world that you are keeping an eye on that you think other in-house lawyers should be mindful of?
One of the most significant trends I have observed is the rapid evolution of AI. My company recently updated its strategy to place AI at its core, prompting me to explore AI from business, regulatory, and compliance perspectives. This shift has reinforced AI’s transformative potential for both legal work and business strategy.
What excites me most is how AI is challenging traditional legal approaches and creating opportunities for innovation in legal service delivery. I firmly believe that in-house counsel must actively embrace AI tools in their own work. The traditional methods of legal practice are being disrupted, and those who remain curious and open to adopting AI tools will gain a significant competitive edge. AI is already enabling more sophisticated approaches to legal risk management and compliance. By combining legal expertise with AI capabilities, we can analyse vast amounts of data to identify patterns and potential issues before they escalate. This proactive approach is redefining how legal departments add value to their organisations.
For in-house counsel, integrating AI into our toolkit is not just about efficiency; it is about adapting to a new era of legal practice. By automating routine tasks, we can shift from reactive work to proactive, strategic contributions. The time saved allows us to focus on more meaningful work, fostering creativity and innovation.
My key advice to peers is simple: stay curious. AI presents a compelling opportunity to rethink how we work and introduce creativity into the legal field. By harnessing AI as an assistant or sparring partner, we can enhance both the efficiency and impact of our contributions. At the same time, it is crucial to build a solid foundation in AI compliance, which I believe will soon become as indispensable as data protection expertise is today. We must actively experiment with new tools, share insights with peers, and continuously develop our technological skills alongside our legal expertise. This is not just about staying relevant; it is about leading the transformation of legal practice and delivering greater value to our organisations.
How do you display creativity in your role?
I have always considered that the legal profession involves far more creativity than people tend to give credit for. Lawyers are constantly creating, whether it’s creating interpretations, contractual relations, understanding between opposing parties, or policies. Although I have always highly valued the creativity aspect of my profession, my approach to creativity has been fundamentally transformed and expanded by AI. Previously, my creativity was very much restricted to my own skills, capacity, time constraints, and imagination, but this has now changed. AI tools have become my best friend in fostering creativity in my work.
A concrete example is how I’ve reimagined the drafting and review processes. I now use AI to analyse, for example, policies and contractual clauses from multiple perspectives—different roles, cultural backgrounds, and age groups—to identify potential interpretational variances or unintended biases. This approach has revealed subtle nuances in language and assumptions that might have remained hidden in traditional legal review processes, allowing us to create more inclusive and clearer documentation.
This creative application of AI extends beyond document review. I’ve used AI to challenge our standard legal assumptions by presenting alternative viewpoints and scenarios we might not have considered. This has proven particularly valuable in our ethical AI framework development, where considering diverse perspectives is crucial for creating robust and inclusive guidelines.
The key to creativity in my role has been using technology not just to do things faster, but to do them differently and more comprehensively. This approach has enabled me to add unique value while ensuring our legal frameworks remain human-centric and ethically sound. And finally, I’m glad to say that the use of AI tools has not switched off my own creative thinking or imagination; quite the contrary. In fact, being regularly exposed to diverse perspectives through AI has enhanced my creative thinking capabilities and significantly reduced instances where I find myself at an impasse in problem-solving.