Team size: Ten

Focus on: From reactive to proactive

It is well known that for a legal department to grow and provide better services it needs to take the step from reactive containment to proactive prevention. But, regardless of how simple this may sound on the outset, it is possibly the biggest challenge a legal department will face. It is a very comfortable position to react to whatever is thrown at you. While the workload may cause problems it is easy to establish procedures and then work through the problems as they arise. This way, there is no problem to justify decisions and engage external support when required. If established routines are followed, results can hardly be questioned, and it is easy to justify costs and resources used.

Taking the step to prevent issues before they arise, however, requires knowledge of the business, experience in the respective regulatory environment and a sufficient standing in the organization to introduce changes that the business may not regard as necessary, at that point in time. It also exposes you to criticism, in case the regulatory landscape shifts in a different direction, or worse, your measures fail to prevent the issue. The first requirement might be the easiest, as it is the established advantage of an in-house legal department. You know the business very well, and therefore, are far better positioned to advise than external consultants. However, it takes time and experience to get to these insights. Many legal counsels fail here because they believe their organization works the same way as their previous one. But especially if the stakeholders or cultural backgrounds are different, the expectations can differ massively.

The Middle East is prone to rapid unexpected changes that will surprise even the best prepared legal counsels. Moreover, there are global trends in standardisation, alignments in privacy, data protection and prevention of criminal activities, that a good legal counsel needs to have on their radar. Finally, having the courage and standing to suggest and push through initiatives in your own organization is a major challenge. It requires willingness to shift the approach, to enhance the services that the legal department has to offer. Thereby, adjusting the narrative from established processes to convincing management of unclear future risks and outlining how to tackle them. It also requires far more collaboration with the different stakeholders, to prepare decisions and find suitable solutions as most of these decisions will have a direct impact on the current or future business of the company. One of the weak spots of many legal counsels is the willingness to think in terms of calculated risk taking and exposure to failure. Lawyers are not taught to think in these terms, and this holds back many in-house teams from exploring their full potential.