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? 

At our core, our job is to help the business team mitigate risks in a pro-active manner, using both our legal and business expertise, every day. However, crises do happen in the world of international quick service restaurants, given that we have thousands of restaurants around the world. Our legal department is intertwined with the communications and business team every step of the way in order to navigate these matters. In fact, our head of crisis management is our global general counsel and a member of our legal team is always part of each crisis management team, whether a local event or worldwide. Ideally, once a crisis has passed, we will dive deep to learn what we, as an organisation, can do better. Crises can be great learning lessons about what needs to change in order for the organisation to be more successful.

What emerging technologies do you see as having the most significant impact on the legal profession in the near future, and how do you stay updated on these developments? 

Several years ago, we undertook the task of automating the standard letters and contracts that we use the most. This way, the business team can generate their own documents in their own time. We have found this to be very helpful in terms of speed of service and also frees up lawyer time so that we can spend more time on things that matter.

Using AI to help with negotiated wording, make presentations and do document discovery to save on legal costs is a logical next step. We are lucky to have a top notch digital and tech team to help keep us updated as well as safety test any new technology before launch.