Team size: 2

What are the key projects that you have been involved in over the past 12 months?

Over the past 12 months, the legal team at Alliance Healthcare has been actively engaged in several major transformation projects.

To begin with, Alliance Healthcare transitioned from its old warehouse to a new, fully automated facility. Throughout this process, the legal team played a key role in securing robust contracts with the automation provider and other critical suppliers. Additionally, the company upgraded its IT systems at the wholesale premises, which required legal expertise to ensure sound IT implementation and service agreements for the updated infrastructure.

Over the past years, the business has also rolled out a new ERP system across all 150 pharmacies. The outdated Farmapro system used by all Norwegian pharmacies, was replaced by EIK, a modern platform featuring a unified patient journal for all pharmacies in Norway. Simultaneously, pharmacy chains in Norway introduced their own POS and RX systems on top of the new platform. Alliance Healthcare has focused on deploying this solution to its pharmacies and to other authorised customers. The legal team has been an essential stakeholder, providing support throughout this project.

Given Norway’s emphasis on ESG, what role do GCs play in embedding these principles across the organisation?

The introduction of the Transparency Act in 2022 placed ESG considerations at the forefront for legal teams throughout Norway. Now, four years since the act came into force, ESG principles are firmly incorporated into the corporate governance structures of leading organisations. Legal teams continue to play an important role in ensuring compliance with the Transparency Act and other local legal requirements within the ESG field. However, during the past years responding to emerging sustainability reporting obligations set by the European Union, especially those stemming from the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), has also been a focus area.

Within this landscape, the General Counsel has taken on a critical leadership role in advancing ESG implementation across the organisation. The General Counsel is a key stakeholder in interpreting ESG obligations arising from Norwegian law and EU/EEA regulations and translating them into effective governance frameworks, policies, and decision-making processes.

This encompasses leading ESG-related due diligence, integrating ESG standards into contracts and supplier relationships, and overseeing the management of disclosure and information requests. The General Counsel’s work contributes to ensuring that ESG principles are systematically embedded throughout the company’s operations.

Beyond the requirements of compliance, the General Counsel also provides advice on strategic risks associated with ESG, including reputational risks, potential litigation, and the risk of greenwashing. The position serves as a bridge between legal, compliance, communications, procurement, human resources and sustainability teams, helping to uphold integrity and transparency at every level. In Norway’s trust-based business environment, the General Counsel plays a vital role in fostering credible and sustainable value creation.

As AI becomes increasingly integrated into legal teams, and the pressure grows to ‘do more with less’, how can GC balance efficiency, quality and human judgement?

As AI becomes more embedded in legal teams, the General Counsel’s challenge is to ensure efficiency gains do not come at the expense of quality and legal integrity. The starting point is clarity. AI is most effective in high-volume, repeatable and judgement-light work, such as first-pass contract review, research summaries or legal intake. AI should support legal analysis, not replace accountability for advice or risk decisions.

Equally important is investing in people. AI can accelerate answers, but it cannot develop legal instinct. Legal leaders therefore need to set clear expectations around verification, critical thinking and ownership, and ensure lawyers can explain — not just produce — their conclusions. Used well, AI strengthens judgement by testing assumptions and surfacing blind spots; used poorly, it risks deskilling and providing inaccurate answers.

Finally, efficiency must be redefined. The real value of AI is not doing more work faster, but freeing capacity for more strategic, proactive and judgment-heavy legal work, particularly in heavily regulated sectors like healthcare.

Ultimately, the General Counsel’s role is to ensure that sufficient governance, boundaries and the right culture is in place such that AI elevates, rather than dilutes, the value of the legal function.