Team size : 10

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?

Especially during periods of instability and crises it is crucial to show confidence that these times can be managed and overcome whilst still acknowledging the potential risks, uncertainties, and challenges. It is also very important to stay closely connected with the team and key stakeholders in order to understand what kind of support the team or key stakeholder might require and/or the challenges they may be facing. Good communication plays a vital role in managing legal aspects too, to be able to provide clear direction. The team should also show an agile and flexible approach in tackling potential legal risks that might come along with instabilities and crisis but at the same time it should be ensured that the team is addressing the most pressing issues first and that the legal support provided is still concise and straightforward. However, having a proactive mindset implemented and being seen as “business partner” is the most important step to being able to identify and manage legal risks not only during periods of instability and crises.

We always ensure within our global legal department that apart from a given governance setup the legal strategies, guidance and risk assessment seamlessly mesh with the broader business goals. However, in times of uncertainty, the legal strategy may have to be revisited to ensure it sets the right priorities and focus to allow co-piloting the business through instability or crisis.

How have you integrated technology into your legal processes, and what impact has this had on efficiency and compliance?

With the AI revolution, there are many solutions, offering a broad spectrum of functionality for a wide variety of tools to optimize and make legal counseling more efficient. Currently, my team is experimenting and investigating a wide variety of tools. Specifically, we have integrated a STADA internal instance of ChatGPT in our workflow and we are also experimenting with Microsoft’s Co-Pilot within our Microsoft environment. While the use and implementation of these tools is up to each team member individually, I’m already seeing some positive effects in terms of efficiency for some team members, in particular, where time-consuming activities which do not require in depth legal analysis can be handled by either system.