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?

During periods of business instability or crises, the focused management of legal, quality and risk issues take centre stage in concert with organisational business strategy to minimise reputational, economic and societal impact. However, these should in fact be constant themes for C-suite and enterprise attention even when times are good.

For any specific crisis, which by nature may be unpredictable, the multi-disciplinary engagement of key business leadership together with our legal and risk teams is essential for strategic alignment of communications and actions which need to be adaptable as a crisis unfolds. Crisis management needs to be calm and systematic, and for well-prepared organisations, a crisis is not tantamount to chaos nor commercial disaster if proactive preparation and crisis responses plans and protocols have already been put in place.

In-house legal and risk teams play a central role in crisis preparation and response protocols, including during crisis simulations where we pressure-test response protocols and escalation triggers to build confidence in the process and team charged with crisis management, and to identify any gaps or unforeseen risks. As in-house advisors, we have a unique perspective when our own business is in crisis and can provide insights which even expert external counsel may not have.

It is important that our legal strategy aligns with the broader business strategy as legal decisions impact organisational reputation, financial stability, and stakeholder trust. Our approach during a crisis also strikes a balance between legal risk and preserving goodwill in the context of the particular crisis, which contributes to our ability to weather the storm and enterprise resilience.

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?

Having had the opportunity to take a deep dive into generative AI, there is no question that this technology is poised to revolutionise aspects of practice within the legal profession for both in-house and private practitioners. Deployed wisely, generative AI will enhance productivity, efficiency, quality and competitive advantage.

At this current stage of development, generative AI will impact what we do as lawyers at a task level. It’s a powerful tool to augment daily legal work. Coupled with legal process transformation and reengineering, we will see even greater strides in legal process automation. This will eventually have some impact on the scope of legal services that lawyers provide, but for those of us who have had hands-on experience with the technology, the headlines touting generative AI is the beginning of the end of the legal profession is uninformed hype.

Practical use cases for generative AI implemented with appropriate risk mitigation for legal, ethical and governance concerns include legal document drafting, analysis and summarisation, contract review and due diligence, legal research, predictive analytics, risk assessment and client service self-help tools.

There are multiple ways to stay up to date in this fast-moving space, but my number one recommendation is to be hands-on, so you understand the basics of how technology can augment daily legal work. As you become familiar with the technology, new ideas and ways of using it will evolve for your specific legal practice.

Other ways to broaden your knowledge of generative AI from both a practical and legal issues perspective include undertaking training courses particularly on prompt engineering, joining online legal associations and communities, such as Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) or Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), that actively share information on use cases and a range of the other insights, reading the IT industry press on major new generative AI announcements, and working with legal generative AI application vendors and consultants, but only those who actually understand the legal profession and how we work as lawyers.