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?

I think as a general counsel one should not only investigate the legal aspects of the business. To my mind it is important to take a broader view and adopt the position of a general risk manager with a holistic approach to corporate governance. Consequently, we added the teams risk management and process management to the legal department. Our new risk management framework deals with strategic risks, regulatory risks, and risks in business processes. We are interlinking risk, business process, and compliance management and are aiming towards risk-oriented business process management and process-oriented risk management. We strongly believe that our approach will support the organisation in dealing with instability and crisis more effectively and efficiently.

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

I am constantly working on improving the efficiency of the legal department by means of technology. To support this, I have a full-time legal tech and operations manager in my department reporting directly to me. To my mind there are some must-haves to work efficiently, e. g. digital matter and contract management, electronic contract signatures. I am reluctant in implementing technological solutions that are only nice to have; often possible efficiency gains dissolve when you take licence, infrastructure and implementation cost into account. On the other hand, especially the new ESG-requirements in Europe are so vast and multi-layered that you can only be compliant by using the means of technology; this also includes in some cases artificial intelligence.