Team size: 12

Could you share an example of a time when you came up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works and did not come at a large expense?

Innovation and creativity are a constant way of working within legal teams I have worked with over the course of my 27-year in-house legal career at Unilever, across West Africa. and more recently at Guinness Nigeria. An example of an innovation that improved how my legal team works without any cost at all was the introduction of a legal scorecard with which the legal function tracks its impact and reports to the senior leadership across West Africa, monthly. The legal team had initially engaged management regularly but the legal scorecard was a game changer in that it identified clear legal KPIs for our business and reported on a monthly basis on those KPIs, this enabled management to gain better understanding of legal matters across critical areas of the business and provide the necessary support to the legal team in resolving them and clearing the path for organisational and business objectives to be met in a legally compliant way.

The scorecard also enabled the legal team to better manage legal risks and pull the right levers to drive greater impact with business partners. Critical areas which the scorecard highlights are litigation; compliance, brand protection actions, business integrity breaches; and legal trainings and awareness on high-risk matters. It involved me coming with the idea of what I should look like, brainstorming with the team on high impact areas for legal, validating them with business stakeholders and the leadership team, designing a fit-for-purpose and balanced scorecard template, designing a more detailed word pre-read template and rolling same out.

This scorecard is used to engage across all levels of the organisation, and it came at zero cost to the business or the legal team. Its use monthly has resulted in a more focused and efficient legal team, better engagement with business partners and critical stakeholders, more proactive management of legal risks, improved performance of legal team members, quicker decision making on legal issues and improved support for the legal function within the organisation. The legal scorecard delivered a structured and consistent approach for business engagement on legal matters.

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

My overarching mindset is that of a business leader who possess legal skills amongst others. I also believe that to effectively partner an organisation and business colleagues, it is critical to understand every aspect of the business. Through the course of my career, I have partnered every aspect of the organisation – marketing, sales, supply chain, human resources, finance and corporate communications – and done sales accompaniment severally with our regional sales representatives to understand the selling process as this is the core of our operations. To bring the legal department closer to business colleagues, I have adopted a business partnering structure and approach in the allocation of legal resources within the legal department which ensures that each member of my team focuses on a function/team within the business and works with the team to ensure end to end compliance. Some of these team members grow to be part of the functional leadership team. The legal team also conduct frequent induction, awareness and training session to business partners to address specific risk areas and enlighten them on mitigation actions. The legal team proactively engages business partners on emerging legal matters and trends, quickly identify gaps and work with business partners to close them. Over the course of my career, I have built critical industry networks through the organised private sector and association of company secretaries and legal advisers which ensure real time information flow from the outside in, and which is immediately cascaded to the business through both formal and informal channels.

With the support of the team, we have put in place structures and procedure whereby legal horizon scanning is done regularly and new developments in the legal framework for my organisation are captured and communicated to the organisation in written form with implications for our operations. As active members of industry associations, legal department team members advocate for matters brought by business partners, ensure they are linked with relevant regulators to engage on matters of mutual benefit. Through consistent engagement, speed of response and quality service delivery, the Legal department continues to build enduring and effective partnerships with business colleagues that enables them to be brought into conversations and transactions at an early stage knowing that they would assist to clear the path for the achievement of business objectives and not clog same.

How important is choosing to work with external lawyers who align with your company’s values? Are you likely to reconsider what firms you work with based on this?

We take matters of values as being extremely critical at the organisations I have worked for. The values provided a strong employer proposition for me and motivated me to join those organisations in the first place. Our values define us and inform our actions and decisions. It is extremely difficult to work with external lawyers who do not share similar values. Accordingly, the value system of an external law firm, its top team and indeed other members of the firm have a strong bearing on whether we work with the firm or not. We look out for firms with high integrity who are committed to delivering excellent service and willing to secure an engagement strictly on merit. We guide our reputation jealously and will only choose external partners and indeed external lawyers who have proven track record of demonstrating values which are aligned with ours and have high integrity in their dealings across board. If there are ethical concerns around any external lawyer we have worked with or currently work with, we will certainly reconsider our business relationship based on the facts.