Team size: Six direct reports, 37 in the team, including indirect reports

What has been the number one challenge that has impacted you over the past year?

For my organisation, a big challenge has arisen from constraints on supply lines internationally, which has led to the business needing to shift focus to actively shape demand and grow the business in line with available supply. International crises has impacted supply chains globally and this has put new requirements on our business throughout the 73 countries we operate in. Our focus is now to be agile, focus on managing stocks and ensuring patients have life-saving medications available to them across all our locations geographically. It also entails legal challenges around contractual delivery timelines and supply expectations.

In your opinion, what areas should in-house lawyers focus on over the next few years to prove value to their organisations in Türkiye?

Certain matters will automatically require legal’s attention including the global economic instability, the impact from inflation and the expansion of international sanctions of Russian entities. Furthermore, from my experience, in-house lawyers can bring significant value to their organisations in Türkiye through strengthening collaboration with both internal and external stakeholders, including relevant authorities. Remote working and virtual engagements are likely to increase and this requires more in-house lawyers to deliver crisp easily understandable advice and effective engaging training. Furthermore, it will be key to help leadership drive the internal organisation of this.

Also in-house counsel can focus on managing risks through a transparent approach. All business comes with inherent risks. Identifying and understanding these should inform how we address and mitigate them and this process starts with an open transparent discussion of the risk between lawyers and the business organisation.

A strong prioritisation of time and actively considering a generalist vs specialist approach is another area in-house lawyers can focus on. In-house lawyers are often required to become more specialised in certain developing areas of law, including e.g. data privacy and protection or sanctions and export control, but are simultaneously required to have a much more generalist approach compared with lawyers working in law-firms that typically specialise in only a couple of areas of law. This requires a strict focus on prioritisation of time for in-house lawyers both in terms of the importance of tasks, but also on how to build different specialty competencies within in-house teams and where to seek external advice. Managing costs and ensuring adequate focus on the areas of key business growth and risks is paramount to provide the most value as an in-house lawyer.

Could you share an example of a time when you came up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works and did not come at a large expense?

We have recently anchored an ever stronger cross-functional collaboration with key stakeholders including our HR colleagues and our colleagues focusing on the medical aspects of the health care industry and Novo Nordisk’s business. This entails increased coordination of communication messages, guidance to the organisation and training/educational efforts. The strengthened collaboration takes dedicated time and resources and has involved some branding efforts together with an external vendor, but has significantly improved the alignment. This, in turn helps mitigate key concerns related to both legal and compliance risks, organisational and company culture matters and contributes to strengthening team culture, shared ownership of compliance risks and showing some of the value the legal and compliance organisation brings to the business and organisation across Novo Nordisk.