How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crises, and how does your legal strategy align with the broader business strategy to ensure organisational resilience?

Crises rarely present as legal questions. They present as commercial problems with legal consequences, and the legal function either helps solve them or arrives too late to matter. The work is therefore to build the conditions for good decisions in advance: knowing where the real exposures sit, keeping escalation routes short, and making sure the business knows it can call the legal team before a decision is taken rather than after.

Strategic alignment comes from measuring the legal team against the same objectives as the business. Resilience is not the absence of risk; it is the capacity to take risk knowingly and recover well. That is the standard the team is held to.

How do you see AI and automation reshaping the legal profession, and how are you leveraging technology in your own legal team?

The technology is rarely the hard part. Automation works only where someone has first written down which positions we accept, which we negotiate and which we refuse – legal work of the most traditional kind, with the tool as the delivery mechanism. In our own team the sequence has been foundations first, tools second: an organised repository, shared templates and structured matter reporting, before any question of what to buy. A team that automates before it has organised itself does not gain leverage; it produces faster disorder.

The limits matter equally. AI output is a draft, never advice; judgement, privilege and accountability stay with the lawyer. The profession is not being replaced but rebalanced. The distinguishing skill for the next generation of in-house counsel will be designing systems, human and technological, that deliver reliable judgement at the speed the business needs – which depends on understanding the business well enough to see a risk before it is drafted into a contract.