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? 

In my time at AS Watson, we have seen a global pandemic, monetary crises and international conflicts.

Horizon scanning is key to ensuring that we can identify any upcoming events, assess their potential implications for us and ensure that we put frameworks and processes in place to manage their impact.

I try to lead with empathy and with clear and transparent communication. Listening, understanding the potential and realised impacts of change on our business colleagues are also critical to ensuring that we can respond in the right way and remain aligned to the wider strategy.

Corporate knowledge transfer is harder in times of crisis, but this is when it is more important than ever. Staying closely connected to our colleagues in different regions – both in legal and in the wider business – is a critical factor to staying on top of potential risk.

I believe that part of our strength comes from our collective expertise and experience. Fostering a knowledge-sharing culture that allows our lawyers to exchange ideas, share best practice and align on approach allows us to respond quickly to evolving business needs, regulatory changes or legal challenges.

What strategic priorities are guiding you and your team in 2024? 

AS Watson continues to pursue an ambitious digital transformation programme to support our O+O digital customers and in line with our customers’ evolving needs in shopping for health and beauty. The legal function must be able to support that programme with digital transformation of our own.

We need to ensure that our focus remains relevant and appropriate to the risk profile of our company. For a retail business the pivot away from bricks and mortar to O+O (offline plus online) presents new challenges to our risk management model. Whilst stores and leases were a major risk to manage in the past, we now need to manage the challenges of social media, digital marketing and compliance with diverse regulatory frameworks in different markets.

Additionally, while the opportunities presented by recent developments in AI are undeniably huge, navigating an increasingly complex legal and regulatory landscape in multiple regimes is increasingly becoming one of our biggest challenges.

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? 

In the past 18 months the legal function has undergone a robust digital transformation programme to drive technology-enabled process improvements to align with the company’s digital transformation roadmap.

In 2022 we recruited a Legal Operations Manager to provide strategic direction for our programme of process improvement and technology obviously forms a large part of that.

I believe that the growing budgetary pressures on corporate legal departments in the future will drive a greater focus on the sustainable use of technology, such as leveraging best value from an existing technology stack, responsible use of AI (with clear use cases) and increased automation to streamline repetitive and manual tasks, such as AI-assisted contract review.

I would like to see increasing pressure on legal technology providers to ensure that their products can be easily integrated with each other.