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

Over the past months, our team has been involved in raising capital for the company’s accelerated growth. ADP is a long-standing company with a long history, but its innovative take on the market has it operating in startup mode, and scaling incredibly fast. To do this, we have had to focus on securing investments. We received investments from Goldman Sachs in the past, and now have received from BDT Capital Partners, a fund assisting family-owned businesses to scale and then be institutionalised. These are always challenging transactions for inhouse teams, since there are not only complex contractual and corporate aspects to negotiate and document, but there are always interesting issues that need careful handling, such as who needs to control the company and how. Beyond this, we participated in a lot of negotiations and adjustments to the rights of each share, shareholder, and investors.

How do you feel the pandemic has changed the world of work and function of in-house counsel?

The pandemic has had both negative and positive impacts. I’ve always encouraged my team to act as a confidante to our internal users to ensure that we are involved in the initial stages of decision making, so we are seen as valuable partners. The pandemic proved the relevance of legal teams and the importance of seeking legal advice, because people became more conscious of risks and pitfalls from company’s actions or reactions to unexpected events. An example is the force majeure clauses in agreements, which 80% of people did not pay much attention to prior. Suddenly once the pandemic began, there was a strong consensus to understand every single detail about force majeure clauses.
Remote working was another aspect that also impacted the team. There was a shift in how we engaged with internal users, from being able to be mostly in control of our days, and solve certain things through short encounters by the coffee table, a lot of us suddenly had to attend meeting after meeting, all day long, which left the team with minimal time to carry out tasks, or even disconnect for a few minutes between calls. I was dedicated to leading my team through this by advising them on how to manage their calendars and energy intelligently. A mismanagement of our time and calendars could lead to other implications such as mental health issues and threats to our work-life balance.

What do you think are the biggest risks facing your industry? And how are you preparing your company and your team to face those risks?

In the automotive industry now, there has been a semiconductor shortage since 2020. Just like the pandemic, this is an unanticipated issue we are experiencing. As general counsel, it is our responsibility to cover the unexpected issues that arise, but also be able to swiftly react and adapt. We have been very focused on a better use of technology over the past couple of years, emphasizing a better understanding and exploitation of existing internal resources like Sharepoint and such.
I also encourage my teams to get into things such as the PDCA methodologies, and think about processes too. We are learning to look at our work from different perspectives, other than the technical legal aspects of it, trying to identify relevant metrics, analysing parts of our systems, clauses and more that may need improvement, removal, or optimisation, just so that we are continuously improving our services and able to react extremely fast in the event of unexpected risks. We are trying to establish processes to face risk and taking a systematic and procedural approach to our work. I believe an agile team that improves, reacts and adapts quickly is what the industry needs.