Legal Team Size: Three

Major Legal Counsel: Locke Lord, Littler Mendelson

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crises, and how does your legal strategy align with broader business strategy to ensure the organization’s resilience?

The key to successfully managing legal matters in a time of instability or crisis is flexibility. While acting consistently with an organisation’s crisis management plan is always preferred, legal managers must be able to pivot from such guidelines when the circumstances warrant deviation. Likewise, legal management needs to be prepared to “think outside of the box” when dealing with legal issues during a time of corporate instability as no two crises are the same. Because of the general uncertainty of a crisis, the legal department is immediately engaged in all facets of the response effort to help protect the organisation from legal related risks such as governmental penalties, lawsuits, and corporate reputational damage. By doing so, specific legal strategies can be developed and implemented from the very beginning of a crisis. This not only minimises related legal, compliance, and governance risk, but it also allows ongoing legal safeguards to be effectively integrated into the initial collective corporate response as well as all subsequent measures.

In your opinion, what are the main trends affecting your work now?

The primary current trend affecting our business and legal work continues to be the state of the economy from both a national and international viewpoint. We are hopeful that the recent U.S. elections will bring a better sense of certainty from an overall business perspective, but we expect the related political changes to make overall legal compliance a bit challenging in 2025. Also, a growing number of vendor/customer insolvencies and “progressive” state level workplace legislation (to counter the U.S. election results at the federal level) will also have to be closely monitored to help minimise their respective impact on our organisation’s business performance. Moreover, the trickledown effect of client/customer cost-cutting initiatives will have to be creatively addressed by our department for us to continue to provide an elevated level of legal support with reduced resources.

What strategic priorities are guiding your legal team into 2025?

Privacy/data security enhancement, international regulatory compliance, and outside legal service spend reduction are current legal department priorities that will continue in 2025. Additionally, the legal department will be implementing several initiatives aimed at improving our legal service agility and flexibility for internal clients and stakeholders. Lastly, 2025 will see the finalisation and deployment of new governance measures to address the integration of AI into the workplace.