How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crises, and how does your legal strategy align with the broader business strategy to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

The legal function is integral to Bapco Refining (BR)’s organisational resilience. In order to meet the objectives of our business partners and stakeholders and align the legal strategy with the broader business strategy, I have imbedded the Legal function across all functions. The key manner in which I have ensured this is by securing the approval of my business partners to have legal function representation on every committee and working group across the business including the crisis, business continuity planning and disaster committees and working groups. This has ensured that I have played a proactive role in managing legal risk in these spheres at the planning stage in a pro-active manner.

How have you integrated technology into your legal processes, and what impact has this had on efficiency and compliance?

I have introduced a CLM solution to our marketing function as a pilot this year. This tool has been highly efficient in reducing contracting time which is essential for BR’s business considering that it executes more than 4000+ contracts (excluding third party paper) annually. The CLM solution will embed BR’s policies, processes and schedule of authority into the workflows providing a full negotiation and execution trail. In addition, I have been able to standardise a lot of the contractual provisions including the boiler plate provisions. All of this functionality will result in greater efficiency in monitoring compliance in addition to systematic legal risk management of the contracts and greater procedural ease for government and internal audits.