Team size: 1,680 (As I am CLO and CAO, my team includes non-legal functions, such as security, real estate, procurement and commercial negotiations).

What are the most significant cases, projects, or transactions that you and your legal team have recently been involved in?

Over the past year, our legal team has managed a broad range of complex matters, including high-stakes litigation, complex billion-dollar commercial deals, large acquisitions, and technology transformation initiatives. For example, our Legal and Corporate Administration (LCA) team organised a company-wide online generative AI hackathon that ultimately involved more than 53,000 of our associates and set a Guinness World Record. This required different parts of the LCA team, such as Legal, Compliance, Security and Procurement, to work collaboratively and with a sense of urgency. We launched a “Copilot Challenge” to build AI literacy within our department and encourage innovation. Our legal team also secured a $70m jury verdict in a significant trade secret dispute, demonstrating our continued willingness and ability to protect intellectual property.

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

I focus on ensuring that I have a team I can trust to demonstrate good judgment and solve problems with agility and independently. And importantly, we must work collaboratively and provide each other with a line of sight regarding our Company’s challenges and opportunities. It helps to have playbooks for foreseeable and often repeated scenarios and conduct table-top exercises to game out potential crises. This helps us break down information silos, identify key stakeholders, and familiarise them with important lines of communication in the event of a crisis. After each crisis has passed, we conduct thorough reviews to determine the root cause and share insights across the organisation.

What do you think are the most important attributes for a modern in-house counsel to possess?

In-house counsel need to be able to build trust throughout the organisation they support so that key stakeholders come to them early and often. In-house counsel needs to earn the trusted advisor status that is the bedrock of effective guidance and leadership. To do that, they must demonstrate good judgement, adaptability, the ability to work as a team, and offer creative solutions to problems.

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?

Artificial intelligence. We expect that lawyers of the future will be comfortable with AI, how it works and how to optimise its use or risk being left behind.