Team size: Seven 

Major legal advisers: Ford Harrison, Masuda Funai, Faegre Drinker   

What has been the number one challenge that has impacted you over the past year?  

The number one challenge this year has been an increased workload due to customer requests to comply with ESG requirements while also trying to retain employees. This year, there have been more requests from customers to sign agreements related to ESG. In the past, we would receive these requests occasionally, but because of the high number of active customers we have, we receive these types of requests daily. 

Additionally, as most employers in the United States know, employee retention has been a great challenge the last few years. The time required to train an in-house attorney in our processes can take years. Retention outside of our department also influences our work because those employees we work with closely also need to be trained in our internal processes. When a valued business partner who understands the contract negotiation process leaves the company, it can also take years to train the replacement in our negotiation processes. 

To improve employee retention, I have made efforts to meet with employees more often to discuss career goals and the promotion path. Being more transparent about the future is critical to employee retention as often employees seek other opportunities because they don’t understand what their future could be with their current employer. I have also shared my methods with the rest of the company to help them improve their employee retention as well.  

Could you share an example of a time when you came up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works and did not come at a large expense?  

During the pandemic, some in our department were struggling with remote work and I decided that we needed more interaction and better tracking of our assignments. In the past, each attorney completed a monthly report on the matters they had worked on over the past month. The creation of this report also had the benefit of making sure that assignments were not forgotten, but it took hours to complete at the end of each month.

To solve our issues, I decided that each attorney would record any new assignments on a shared tracking file that we updated daily. Also, I decided that we would meet each morning via a Microsoft Teams meeting to discuss new and any pending matters. The increased daily interaction and tracking helped us improve the service to our customers and brought us closer as a team during a difficult time. Over time, we started to use that meeting each morning to review matters together for training purposes. 

Our new system works so well that despite the pandemic being over, we still hold the same meeting each morning and continue tracking new matters daily.    

What would you say are the unique qualities required to be successful as an in-house lawyer in your industry?  

Speed of service is the quality necessary to be a successful in-house in our industry. Misumi provides standard and component parts to factories across the Americas. To our customers, often how quickly they can receive a replacement part is more critical than price because they can’t afford to have production stop. How quickly contracts with new suppliers and customers can be negotiated is critical for our in-house attorneys.