Based on your experience, what is the key to collaborating successfully with business partners?

Business partners each have their own KPIs and priorities, and it is critically important to understand those KPIs and priorities and how the legal function contributes to those outcomes. Have planning conversations with business partners to work out what you can do to contribute to help them achieve their objectives. In particular, understand the financials, the P&L, the balance sheet, and be clear about how you add value to each line of the P&L.

We are now living in a changing geopolitical environment, with increased sanctions and export controls over the past two to three years. Does this affect your work, particularly regarding your risk management duties?

As a consumer goods business, the top priority is to always have the availability of goods for consumers around the world. The changing geopolitical environment makes the availability of goods more and more challenging. Most manufacturing companies have globalised supply chains that rely on the free movement of goods. Limitations to the free movement of goods, whether sanctions, export controls, conflict or the physical availability of materials and logistics, pose a significant risk to business continuity.

Apart from legal matters, has the team worked on other company initiatives you would like to highlight?

Reckitt owns and manufactures a number of products that have a very strong purpose. Our Finish dishwashing tablets help to save water by enabling a water saving of over 90% when comparing dishwashers to handwashing. Our Durex brand is the world’s largest condom brand, and plays a significant role in preventing the spread of STIs and unwanted teen pregnancies – the latter being one of the leading drivers of poverty in the world. Our legal team is leading a number of initiatives that drive changes to laws and regulations to enable these brands to extend the reach of their benefits in line with our business objectives.

Are the effects of AI on the legal world overplayed, or underplayed?

AI presents a number of opportunities and challenges for the legal industry. Firstly, the use of AI in marketing and communication presents legal and ethics risks that have never been present before, and we have a role to play both in building awareness of these risks and in improving the regulation and governance of the various use cases. Secondly for the legal industry, it gives us an opportunity to simplify much of the tasks that lawyers do on a daily basis. There are now more cost-effective solutions to much of the lower value work that lawyers have traditionally undertaken, which can help to improve the efficiency of how we do our work.

The most significant benefit of AI is forcing us to answer the question of what AI cannot do, and therefore what human lawyers should be focussing on. AI is fundamentally a pattern recognition model. It specialises in digesting and processing large amounts of information and performs technical tasks well. The soft skills that are so important in our business partnering and leadership role cannot be performed by AI. Therefore, a better understanding of what AI can do, will enable us to create a more focussed approach to developing our human skills.