<strong>Team size: </strong> 6 

<strong>What are the most significant cases and/or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in? </strong> 

The past year has been a period of innovation for Corsearch, with the legal team serving as a core strategic business partner on the execution of these changes rather than a transactional support function. 

We provided assistance on the successful global launch of Corsearch Zeal 2.0, our new brand protection platform; the AI-driven enhancements to our trademark platform TrademarkNow; and the integration of our Revenue Recovery services. 

We assisted on various acquisitions, ensuring our partnership extended beyond closing and that the team played an active role in the long-term integration process. 

We worked closely with our CIO on the legal and data-privacy migration from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace, while simultaneously redefining our procurement onboarding process. 

We took a customer-first approach to our contracting and removed unnecessary roadblocks that caused delay by equipping non-legal teams with FAQs, “deal-breaker” guides, and negotiation playbooks, which resulted in a greatly improved deal velocity and empowered our sales division to close high-value contracts with greater autonomy. 

<strong>What do you see as an opportunity or risk over the next six months? </strong> 

The shift from the use of generative AI to agentic AI presents a huge amount of opportunity but equally carries risk. Legal teams can and should be using agentic AI to automate routine multi-step tasks rather than just for answering questions. The key opportunity here is for teams to scale at pace, reduce costs to the business and allow for focus on higher value work. 

At the same time, agentic AI creates risk if not used ethically and has the potential to impact the development of juniors, who may miss out on the ability to learn by osmosis and understand the inner workings of why and how processes are run. 

Legal teams need to be clear on their strategy to mitigate risks not just for themselves, but also any team in the business using agentic AI. 

It is necessary to bridge the training gap by ensuring junior team members work alongside senior members to understand the logic and rationale for decisions being made. They need to understand how to do the work without the agent to properly and critically evaluate the outcomes. 

Attention also needs to be paid to governance by creating a policy for use across the business that ensures transparency and human oversight are at its core. Legal teams need to act as a strategic navigator for the entire business in this continually evolving world of AI by ensuring the policy is not only put in place but monitored wherever AI is deployed across the business. 

<strong> 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? </strong> 

The most impactful low-cost innovation I implemented was the creation of dynamic negotiation playbooks. For me, it’s always important to do this as a team; by putting each clause into a document and adding the commercial and legal rationale, providing canned responses for pushbacks and pre-approved fallbacks. The initial investment was a couple of days of the team’s time, but the ROI was immediate – it helped to ensure that the team had a consistent approach, reduced noise on approvals and improved our turnaround times. 

The key part in making a playbook successful is ensuring that the playbook is a living data-driven document that gets regularly updated and fallbacks are tracked. If we notice that a fallback is being used regularly – we take that as a sign to consider updating our standard positions. 

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

Being an expert in the law is no longer enough for in-house counsel, it is the basic expectation. 

In my opinion, to be a successful modern in-house counsel you need to be able to demonstrate a people focussed mindset, have a good level of AI literacy, possess deep grasp of the commercial drivers that matter to your business (such as finance, sales and technology) and ultimately be constantly curious. 

To be successful, a modern in-house counsel has to be a strategic chameleon who can adapt easily to the variety of stakeholders, tasks and conversations that they will be faced with. Each business unit expects you to be able to understand the language they are speaking and approaching those conversations with curiosity is essential to that success.