About

What are the most important transactions and litigations that you have been involved in during the last two years?

The US$63bn acquisition of Monsanto by Bayer and the integration of two companies and its reflections within the countries is the biggest transaction I have ever experienced in my business life. Closure of our pharmaceutical production site where 400 employees have worked was one of the most difficult involvements, where emotions and professionalism go hand in hand.

What have been the major external trends that have impacted your team’s work over the past two years (market developments, changing regulatory environment, political events etc.)?

The government’s cost saving approach to the pharmaceutical sector and change in some reimbursement policies significantly caused my team to widen its horizons in terms of strategic thinking.

What will be the main focus for the company in the next 12 months and how do you intend to assist with this?

Monsanto’s continuing integration with Bayer, divestment of the animal health business and Bayer’s worldwide project where the organisation and support functions, including the legal department, will interact with business and digitalisation in law will be the main focus of our company. Our department will have a huge workload not only supporting the business and global teams in those projects but also have to manage a significant mind-set change of business in how they work with the legal department.

What techniques do you use to provide commercially-focused and optimal business advice to your company? If so, how do you get these across to more junior lawyers in the team?

To be more commercially-focused, you have to know your business very well. It is difficult in companies like Bayer where you operate in various sectors which are totally different from each other. Therefore, as a legal department we go “on field” with our business colleagues, visit customers, wholesalers, pharmacies and Healthcare Professionals (HCP) while they are having their daily routine with them, so that we can see the challenges that business face, gaps where they need support and listen to the thoughts and requests of customers and HCPs. Moreover, every business partner in the legal team is the member to the management team of the related business division. Being a member of the board as the head of legal department helps me support my team members with a strategic approach to their business.

Does the team use any “legal tech” products and do you find them a helpful management device?

We globally use Microsoft Teams for document and post sharing, communication and legal discussions that we do globally and locally. We use Sharepoint for introductions, news, developments, articles, litigation updates for the business. We also have a separate local contract archiving system which was not enough and will be replaced by a user friendly, more developed global system in 2020. We use a specific global software for compliance incidents and training and significant litigation reporting. For data privacy legal support, we have another system called COCPIT where consent form templates, FAQ, organisational structure etc. are available for business. In 2020, for contract management, donation management, litigation reporting and compliance incident reporting we will have a globally designed digital tool which will be used by business and legal together. As legal department, whatever we have in digital technology is always helpful since they decrease administrative task workload and we can focus on topics that are more significant.

In what ways do you see the in-house legal role in evolving in your region over the next few years?

In-house counsel are not support departments any more. Not even being an enabler, we should be talking about being a part of business and management team, having business insight with a strategic mind-set and with customers in mind. When you enter a meeting room with people who sit around a table and discuss business, if you cannot tell who the lawyer is, that’s business partnering.

FOCUS ON: Artificial intelligence

It is said that lawyers, in near future, will lose their job to artificial intelligence lawyers. Ross, “the world’s first artificially intelligent attorney” built on IBM’s cognitive computer Watson, already started to serve for bankruptcy law. Ross was designed to read and understand language, postulate hypotheses when asked questions, research, and then generate responses to back up its conclusions. This sounds very helpful for lawyers to get them up to speed on legal research. On the other hand, Ross can read over a million pages of law in a second, return a cited answer, gets connected to the internet if he does not know the answer, finds it and learns from experience! The next time, he answers the same question himself and in just seconds.

Aside from technical capabilities and speed of AI, what’s really missing from the conversation is what will happen to in-house legal counsel? In spite of the fact that it is a legal job too, in its nature in-house counselling requires slightly different skills: Risk prevention and mitigation, litigation risk assessment, which are not calculable by computerisation.  Some of the in-house counselling skills might be met by AI very comfortably, but to which extent can AI meet “still-only-human-related skills”? The business world is redefining smartness. On top of IQ and EQ, now we are talking about RQ (Resilience Quotient), ability to combine IQ and EQ with a flexibility to face discomfort and move forward with courage. IQ, beyond any dispute, will certainly be better than human beings. But EQ and RQ is still under discussion. Considering all here-mentioned capabilities, it is not getting any less threatening for in-house legal counselling. However, when we acknowledge the jobs which cannot be replaced by AI, all we see is are roles which require strong EQ and RQ and strong relationship management skills. In this regard, there is still hope for the future of in-house legal counsel.