Team size: Eight

Can you tell us a little about your significant accomplishments over the last few years, as a team or by yourself?

Over the last ten years at Murex, I have overseen and negotiated notable commercial transactions with large capital market institutions and banks that have selected our software to equip themselves. Being responsible for the EMEA and the APAC regions requires guaranteeing full alignment within the legal team, in terms of processes and contractual policies. So, it is my role to cultivate a global compliance culture by improving escalation processes with the business and the decision makers.

Additionally, it is my responsibility to keep a close relationship with the business and paying attention to the ever-changing needs of various internal departments, while ensuring reactivity of the legal team. My role is to ensure that the legal function has a genuine operational dimension and integrates business processes and decisions. At this stage of my career, I am convinced that in-house lawyers must play a key role in the strategy and business of every company.

What are the biggest risks your industry is facing now and how are you preparing your team to deal with this?

Murex solutions are becoming more and more complex with interdependencies, technical challenges, and endless new models of providing services. This level of sophistication requires us to be extremely alert when discussing the contractual obligations, responsibilities and the risks which can be acceptable while preserving the alignment with the company’s strategy. Contractual documents are the reflection of such evolutions and require a full comprehension of the evolution of the company and overall, of the IT industry.

How have you harnessed technologies to drive output in your position?

Collecting and processing data is a key part of our business as we need not only to retain all relevant and important data or information, but also to leverage the existing information to handle analysis, reports and identified trends or needs of the legal department. Proper archiving of contracts and related communications are also extremely useful. As important players in planning the business’ strategy, it would be very helpful to have a tool that helps with a single source of entry for everything customer related, in order to have a global and accurate picture of all key contractual elements. Technologies should enable us to reach optimal efficiency, leaving lawyers with enough time to dedicate themselves to adding value to different legal matters of the business, better allocation of resources and appropriate management of legal monitoring.