Focus on… My career 

I am Nisrine EL MIR, the Managing legal and compliance counsel at FUJIFILM. Throughout my career, I had to identify the best “tool” that improved how my legal team works where nothing matched transparent communication. The real challenge was to properly define the process which ensures constructive communication between legal team members and with other players in the organisation. 

This is what motivated me to initiate PhD research around the construction of legal risk in organisations. While looking to improve the working environment, I observed the pain points for legal teams. The management of legal risk is key for inhouse lawyers to avoid criminal admonishment and irreversible reputational damages and a proper management of this risk is essential to sustainable operations and profitable growth in organisations. The findings of my research allowed me to better serve the practical issues at work and pass on the findings and tools to my team. This also helped me to better understand the value proposition of in-house legal counsel role. I proceeded with a deconstruction of the phenomenon of construction of legal risk by browsing through its components and studying the co-action and interplay between the practices and dynamics observed in the process of construction of legal risk in the organisation. Throughout the understanding of key concepts that contributed to the legal risk construction process, I was able to better assist my team in addressing the challenges of an improperly managed legal risk.  

The top challenge that a general counsel faces today is the ability to balance the increasing work requirements against the time and dedication needed to support critical business matters while simultaneously always “having the back” of legal team. By ensuring that the focus on what matters was clear in terms of legal risk, this enabled me to better manage my responsibilities and enhanced the sense of true belonging for my team. The main challenge in my view for any general counsel would be to nurture this sense of belonging and trust as to avoid the “quiet quitting” attitude and silent demotivation.  

The emerging new technologies and their complexities are creating legal risks with interesting dimensions that appear in many cases not yet addressed in MEA jurisdictions. The sanitary crisis has showed that remote working affected positively the independency and autonomy of in-house legal counsels which are now relying more on technology to enhance performance. This emphasises on the need to have more trust as a key component in this new type of remote support and interaction in the organisation for it to generate an efficient legal support model. This is a palpable representation of the urging need to better identify risk and understand its construction particularities as to better prevent it and avoid its disastrous consequences.  

These appear to be the new types of challenges that will add to the complexity of the relationships between legal and non-legal functions in the organisation in the future where only trust can safeguard and enhance constructive and transparent communication and proper legal risk mitigation.