How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crises, and how does your legal strategy align with the broader business strategy to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

Alignment with the wider organisation, anticipation, planning and communication are key to manage legal aspects when a crise emerges. Alignment implies that each legal team member has a clear understanding of the strategic goal and activities of our organisation to be relevant as true business partners on issues that matter for our company. Anticipation implies to regularly perform a legal risk mapping exercise and to also run an efficient knowledge management process to capitalise on past crises and lessons learned. Also being involved in the corporate planning enables to raise legal and regulatory considerations at an early stage and provide valuable input that will not be available from other departments to help senior management manage previously unidentified threats. Finally, communicating within the team to share experience and with senior management to report progress about the complex or relevant issues that the company is facing is essential

What emerging technologies do you see as having the most significant impact on the legal profession in the near future, and how do you stay updated on these developments?

Generative AI and the emergence of large language models (LLLMs) will certainly be a game changer for the legal profession where analysis of precedents and legislation as well as text generation and review are core tasks that are particularly susceptible to AI application. We are already working with legal tech providers and use dedicated AI powered legal solutions to manage routine and repetitive legal work. We keep looking across the full range of our legal operation and available solutions on the market so as to identify further potential use cases, notably in M&A where we expect the power of LLMs will allow us to conduct more detailed due diligence. We’re still on the learning curve but a degree of experimentation is critical to gain an understanding of the possibilities and limits of this transformative technology and to generate meaningful, trusted outputs.