Team size: 5

How is the budget allocated across different functions within your legal team (e.g., litigation, compliance, contract management)? Could you explain the criteria and process used to define these allocations?

Budget allocation within the legal team is driven primarily by the complexity of matters and their potential business impact. In practice, the largest portion of the budget is allocated to sanctions compliance, as these matters typically require the involvement of lawyers from multiple jurisdictions and coordination across regions.
Litigation also represents a significant budget component, given that effective representation before local courts generally requires engagement of qualified local counsel.

What factors influence your decision to use external legal services versus handling matters in-house, and what criteria are used to evaluate their performance?

The decision to engage external legal counsel is primarily driven by the complexity and nature of the matter, as well as internal capacity constraints. Highly complex matters or those requiring specialised local expertise—such as litigation in jurisdictions where we do not have in-house counsel—are typically handled by external law firms.

External support is also used when the in-house legal team’s workload is exceptionally high, making it impossible to absorb additional projects.

The performance of external legal service providers is evaluated based on several criteria, including practicality of legal advice, responsiveness, understanding of the business context, cost, and overall value added.

What are the key projects that you have been involved in over the past twelve months?

A key project for me in 2025 was reshaping the sanctions compliance programme to ensure it is resilient in the current political situation, where sanctions have become a standard foreign policy tool for governments. This is perhaps not surprising, given that sanctions are a relatively quick and cheap instrument of international pressure; however, the burden of implementation falls largely on multinational companies. This requires us to design cross-functional and multinational compliance systems that are adaptable and take into account the existence of multiple applicable sanctions regimes — including UN, US, EU, and national regimes such as those of the UK and Switzerland. We must add to this a lack of uniformity across those sanctions regimes, their increased extraterritorial application, as well as the growing use of countermeasures and blocking laws. Most challenging of all, however, we are faced with almost total unpredictability regarding new geopolitical crises and the sanctions that follow, which makes resilience and agility essential features of any effective compliance framework. Apart from this, 2026 has been an exceptionally busy year at Elanco, as we have been (successfully!) launching a new blockbuster in pet health dermatology, which is one of the largest, fastest-growing global markets in pet health.

What are the key trends that in-house counsel should be monitoring in 2026?

Looking ahead to 2026, I think our main focus will remain on being strategic and business-oriented partners for management. This focus has quite a few practical consequences. Most importantly, with this mindset we will ensure that legal departments do not operate in a vacuum; will absorb AI-driven digital transformation and focus on legal data, as it supports both the assessment of legal department performance and our ability to optimise costs. For me, a key trend to monitor closely will be any shifts around sanctions compliance, which can be abrupt and can have a material impact on business.

Have you had any experiences during your career as a lawyer that stand out as particularly unique or interesting? How do you prioritise diversity and inclusion within your legal department, and what initiatives have you implemented to foster a more inclusive work environment?

I am not sure whether I have had a ‘particularly unique or interesting’ experience as a lawyer — but I certainly have as a person. I was born into a family that was a rich mix of different origins: alongside ethnic Poles, there were family members with Ukrainian, Belarusian and German backgrounds. As a result, we had different faiths, viewpoints, cultures, holidays, and even ways of communicating. In addition, I was partly raised in Poland and partly in Tripoli, Libya.

When you come from such a background, diversity and inclusion are not a project or a policy — they are part of who you are. This experience has made me very intentional about building a team that is diverse in terms of origin, culture, legal education, and languages. That diversity leads to better problem-solving, makes teams more resilient and, frankly, creates a more interesting environment in which to work.

In my view, three elements are critical for successful diversity and inclusion. Firstly, you must genuinely value it and take real joy in it — which I certainly do. Secondly, you need to be very mindful during recruitment processes, genuinely searching for diverse skills. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, leaders must ensure that everyone feels psychologically safe to be themselves. This psychological safety is built through many small, everyday actions: ensuring everyone is involved, has space to speak up, and is truly heard.