Could you please tell us a bit about yourself and your role?

I am the chief legal officer of Aman Group – one of the world’s leading luxury hospitality companies. 

My role covers legal, compliance, company secretarial, tax and risk management. The team is now 13 people across Switzerland, London, Dubai, Singapore and Miami. 

We are a very diverse team, with roughly 50/50 male-female ratio. Team members are expected to work autonomously within their own specialties. We rely heavily on technology given the diverse time zones and team-based working. This would typically include Microsoft suite of tools for communications and collaboration, put also contract management systems, board management software and specialist IP software to help us be more efficient as an organisation.  

The legal team is very well respected within the organisation – the key to this is ensuring that the legal team facilitates what we need to achieve as a broader business. The lawyers are expected to understand the business model, the key financial drivers and the culture of the business and how therefore we fit within it. Our business is heavily reliant on the power of the brand and therefore significant resources are set aside to protect and enhance this, both from an IP perspective but also with litigation strategy. Building new development projects is also key; lawyers need to understand what value these projects bring to the business, and this helps with any negotiation.  

A significant amount of time is spent in calls and meetings with business colleagues to understand trends they are seeing or assistance that they may require. A proactive approach to training can therefore be taken to assist with mitigation of risks before they materialise. 

Sustainability is the core of our business and an incredibly important aspect to our clients. There are always commercial pressures to try to deviate in a particular circumstance from the values, and it is often part of the legal remit to come up with innovative solutions to help all parties meet the commercial objectives. Collaboration tools have also assisted us in reducing business travel despite growing in size as a team significantly over the last two years.  

The term AI is heard constantly in the legal press to explore potential avenues where computer systems replicate or exceed human cognitive functions. The most obvious in my view is around detection of patterns in data and applying these new patterns to automate certain tasks. This has the potential for making so many processes easier and more accurate – notably around due diligence on M&A transactions. Once AI has reached a point where it can review documentation which is included in a data room and then produce reports based on the findings, it will drastically reduce the costs involved in M&A transactions as well as substantially automating the role that is often extremely time consuming with junior counsel.