How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

The main strength we cultivate is strength through discipline. We follow strict procedures in all our operations, and we adhere to them closely. Those procedures have been developed through experience over many years, and following them gives us the best possible outcome, both in results and in limiting our potential exposure. This is particularly relevant in an environment of ever-increasing regulation and reporting obligations.

Based on your experiences in the past year, are there any trends in the legal or business world that you are keeping an eye on that you think other in-house lawyers should be mindful of?

The main issue that is already on everyone’s mind, but for the same reason all the more relevant, is the rise of AI I have already seen how AI tools have taken over tasks once traditionally performed by junior attorneys. Those tools certainly provide new opportunities that we need to make the most of. However, the rise of AI has made legal information and analysis available to anyone, for free. An executive no longer needs to ask the legal department and wait for a reply whenever he or she has a legal question, as it can be asked of a large language model AI. Furthermore, legal responses or analysis we provide can now be reviewed by those executives using those same tools, forcing us in-house lawyers to improve our work and ensure we provide value that goes beyond what can be obtained from these AI tools. This means that these tools are a great help to us, but also a challenge to our work. At this time we must ask ourselves: what value are we adding to the organisation?

AI has been taken seriously as a potentially revolutionary technological change in the legal world for a number of years now. Has it had a meaningful impact in how your legal team works in this time?

Extremely meaningful. Work that we usually outsourced (such as translations or first drafts of basic documents) we no longer do, since we obtain the same results from A.I. tools. This means we are expected to deliver the same results, but faster and cheaper. The president of my company has literally asked me directly if some of the tasks I have done recently have been assisted by A.I.; not to see if I was being lazy, but to make sure I have been using those tools. This trend will only continue, and we must stay on top of the wave, or as close to it as we can, if we want to keep providing quality legal services to our organisation.