Team size: 53

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

Our team has been heavily involved in the signing and closing of various strategic M&A transactions through which Liberty Mutual Insurance divested some of its European and Latin American retail or small commercial businesses to Generali and HDI/Talanx for an aggregate consideration of approximately $3.5bn.

This work has been complex and varied and included pre-sale restructurings; compiling of materials for virtual data rooms; review and input into various sections of auction Share Purchase Agreements, Disclosure Letters; participating in bidder management meetings; responding to due diligence queries; inputting in transitional services agreements; managing various separation matters; reinsurance; regulatory engagement and communications; board restructurings and the compilation of various completion deliverables.

How have you attempted to bring the legal department closer to your business colleagues?

We have organised “deep dive” sessions, during which various functions and business units are asked to help legal understand in more detail how their function operates; how the work they do is key to the company as a whole; and, most importantly, how legal can better support them – for example, what legal do well and should do more of, and what could be done differently and would be viewed by the business as adding real value. We then supplement these deep dive sessions with quarterly check ins with each function head to monitor how legal is supporting the business and to receive feedback, which in turn, facilitates continuous improvement.

We have also engaged with the various business units and functions with which we work to emphasise the importance of involving legal at the very beginning of projects so that we can help act as a facilitator of those projects, thereby avoiding last minute changes or delays that can occur when we are only involved at later stages of the process. To do so, we have shared tangible examples of cases where that early involvement has ultimately assisted the business in meetings its goals and their associated timelines.

Have you used AI in your day-to-day work? If so, how useful do you find it?

At Liberty, we have used Luminance as an AI tool to help us analyse large volumes of contracts, particularly in the context of M&A transactions. Luminance is a legal large language model that uses AI to automate the generation and analysis of contracts. For instance, it can very quickly locate contract clauses dealing with term, termination, change of control, governing law, among others. While its results do require a degree of human oversight and verification, this tool has greatly assisted us in managing and quickly analysing large volumes of contracts.