Can you provide an overview of your current role?

As General Counsel, I have overseen the Lenovo Solutions and Services Group grow from $33m in 2020 to 2024 in $13bn, including 16 consecutive quarters of double-digit growth. This level of growth has been through investment; strategic deals; acquisitions; and expansion of its services portfolio.

I am responsible for overseeing acquisitions; litigation; rollout of new products and services; strategic deals; an asset financing company LGFS and providing worldwide legal, regulatory and compliance support.

Alongside I have established the first Lenovo Legal Operations Team responsible for the entire global legal function and lead a Global Contracting Team of 72 lawyers and contract managers that support all Lenovo’s Sales and Procurement Contracts.

Have you had any experiences during your career as a lawyer that stand out as particularly unique or interesting?

There are a couple of unique aspects of my background. Firstly, I hold an MBA in addition to my legal qualifications and secondly (and probably related!) is that I worked as a Legal Consultant advising other General Counsel on organisational structure and design, global support models, technology adoption and department culture and legal transformation initiatives.

While many General Counsels bring deep legal expertise, combining that with formal business training has given me a broader lens through which to lead. My MBA sharpened my ability to think commercially and strategically and to sit at the executive table not just as a legal advisor, but as a business partner.

In practice this has also shaped how I lead. It gave me the experience and knowledge to run the legal function like a business within and business with a relentless focus on aligning to business objectives and strategy, contributing to long term value creation well beyond traditional legal boundaries and continually transforming to adopt the latest in best business practices.

Sitting on external counsel side and advising other GCs also gave me a unique perspective and insight into numerous other legal teams, how they interact with external advisers, structure their teams and approach technology adoption and change.

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, of which you think other in-house lawyers should be mindful?

Neither of these will be a surprise to any GC!

The sheer scale and pace of Geopolitical and Regulatory complexity whether its new data sovereignty legislation, trade tensions, new cyber security or ESG regulation are currently overwhelming most legal departments.

This is alongside us all trying to navigate the implications of AI; both the challenges of adopting it and what benefits it will bring; what problems it could solve whilst grabbling with the responsibility of the governance aspects and ensuring its ethical and legal use around AI adoption in our businesses. These are complex and resource intensive challenges are set against the backdrop of continuing expectations that Legal Teams can do “more with less” and creates additional tensions between transformation and day to day operational work of any legal team.