Team size: Eight

What impact did Brexit have on the financial Industry in Ireland?

As I perform an enterprise role for a US multinational, Brexit wasn’t one of our major concerns. With that said, the impact on our operations here was to create the need to hive off the Irish/EU and UK business, resulting in additional regulatory authorisations and legal entity creation work. More broadly, I expect that this has created significant logistical and administrative steps not previously required and thus that this has had a knock-on effect on the import and export costs and delays that we now experience.

In what ways do you see the in-house legal role evolving in your region over the next few years?

I can see a continuation of the current trend of greater reliance by companies on their in-house legal functions. This will make thins increasingly competitive in terms of recruitment and talent retention, requiring in-house lawyers to think creatively about offering career progression opportunities beyond the traditional metrics of remuneration and promotion, for instance by offering higher learning and cross-functional work opportunities. We will also see continuing reliance on automated processes, which is likely to increase the number of process-driven areas currently handled manually by lawyers to be outsourced to external service providers.

What are the most significant cases and/or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

Some examples of the work my team has handled in the past year included: a global review of our legal entities to assess opportunities for optimising our corporate structure; a global project to enhance our regulatory compliance function in certain key markets; and various initiatives to increase the maturity of our three lines of defence across our group and regional entity teams.

As we enter the next decade, what skills will a corporate legal team need to succeed in the modern in-house industry?

The modern legal team needs to be closely aligned with its client stakeholders both internally – across all functions with whom it works – and externally with business partners, regulators and others. This ranges from active participation in management meetings and strategic planning to the development of a team mission and strategic team goals aligned with the corporate strategy, all done alongside the articulation of clear metrics by which performance against those goals can be measured. Examples of areas that strategic legal goals should cover could include personal and professional team and individual development, execution on strategic programs to drive responsible growth, acting as a guardian of the company to mitigate risk, internal and external thought leadership and consistent, enterprise-focused process improvement.