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AXA Group has recently centralised most of its support functions via a Group Operations division, which includes a group legal department. The newly-created AXA Group Operations (AXA GO) legal team is currently led by Nicolas Marty and backed up by Jihen Hathroubi and Hubert Canivet, the three of them highly qualified and respected lawyers with vast experience at the top level. ‘Year after year, we develop an environment where all of the legal team members have an equal voice and bring their complementarity. We believe that in-house lawyers must also be part of the group strategy and be recognised as business partners, so that they can act as project managers and lead the company towards market best practices. In 2019, we are proud to be one team with different backgrounds, cultures and experiences but fully committed to AXA’s common values of integrity, collaboration and courage’, Nicolas Marty said of the AXA GO legal function. The team has made these changes to its organisation in anticipation of a changing role for in-house legal teams in the future, as well as an increased reliance of technological solutions, as deputy team head Jihen Hathroubi explains: ‘It is key that in-house legal functions today must adapt their practices to new business behaviours and new ways of management. The in-house legal role must create additional values for the business and be able to transform the legal function through other areas of expertise, such as compliance, risk and contract management’. Hubert Canivet, in charge of IT adds that ‘We believe that the in-house legal function will face new challenges focusing on the fast-developing and wide-ranging impact of AI on the structure of the legal function and the legal profession itself. Consequently, we started working in AXA GO on the restructuring of our internal legal practice to ensure compliance with the developing regulatory regimes related to AI to answer future business needs’. The team’s main day-to-day business consists of supporting AXA’s innovative projects, in particular by developing smart contracts and raising awareness among stakeholders of new legal risks, all while being true business partners to the company.