Team size: five

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?  

I think it all starts from the organisational mindset, specifically how I have managed over the years to prove to my colleagues in other departments that the legal function is not only a support function but a business partnership function. I care very much about this and have focused a lot of effort and time on this.

In other words, the legal function needs to be involved in projects and processes from their very early stage, because a preventive legal approach is always much more desirable than a reactive one. Not to mention the fact that, often, a thorough legal approach has substantially altered for the better some projects and processes that were intended to be carried out in other ways, thus making them compliant with the applicable legal framework and thus saving a lot of internal and external resources that would have been allocated later for various remedies.

Having that in mind all the time, in times of instability or crisis, such as the recent Covid-19 pandemic and geo-political developments in our area, I have found that one of the most relevant keys to success is an even closer communication with the organisation’s departments to ensure that business needs are effectively and timely specified, properly understood and effectively addressed from the legal point of view, given the multitude of special and emergency regulations that needed to be observed and implemented.

In your opinion, what are the main trends that are salient in your country currently (these can be legal, political, economy or business-based)?
I think it is clear to everyone that we live in unpredictable times, in which change is the only constant and the key to success is the ability to adapt to it, regardless of whether we are talking about people, on a personal level, companies, political systems, countries or even large international entities. Much can be said about these topics.

But coming down to the legal trends, the main one worldwide is also the main one in Romania, namely the impact of AI and how it will effectively help to improve the processes and methods applied within the legal function.

If we can currently see relevant results on the side of writing standard documents, searching in large databases, designing thematic structures and other legal processes, not to mention the financial savings involved, the accelerate development of AI with its deep learning features will surely lead to a change of the game even in the legal industry, with results which are somehow difficult to predict at the moment, including the real and visible impact on the people active in the legal field.