How do you ensure the legal function supports business resilience during periods of uncertainty or disruption?

If you look back over the last 20 years or so, regulatory uncertainty has not been the exception — it has been the norm. Financial crises, data privacy overhauls, trade and sanctions shifts, new competition regimes, tariffs imposed randomly on businesses — and I could go on. The legal function hasn’t been bracing for disruption as an occasional event, but rather it has been adapting to constant change for two decades, and that adaptation is itself the source of resilience.

What has changed is the scale and speed at which that uncertainty now moves, and that is where I think the real opportunity sits, particularly with new technologies like AI. AI is proving to be an incredible supporting tool precisely there, helping process large volumes of information, surfacing the contracts or clauses that actually need attention, and giving the legal team a running start instead of a blank page.

Ultimately, it is all about maintaining a legal function that treats change as the baseline, invests early in the tools and relationships that let it respond quickly, and stays comfortable operating in conditions that never fully settle — because they never really have.

In the face of increasing regulation and scrutiny, what are the biggest compliance challenges keeping GCs up at night?

To me, it is not a specific regulation or enforcement trend; it is something harder to fix. Compliance is about culture. It is not really a set of policies or a training module; it is a culture of doing business a certain way, one where people make the right call when no one is watching, because that is simply how the organisation operates.

What keeps me up at night is watching that culture erode globally, not from the bottom, but from the top. We spend years building compliance programmes on the premise that rules matter, that conduct has consequences, that there’s a shared baseline of integrity everyone is expected to meet. And then you watch senior government officials — the very people who set the tone for entire economies and institutions — engage in the exact conduct compliance programmes were built to prevent, with what looks like blatant disregard for the rules, and often without real consequence. That is corrosive in a way that no single regulatory change is. Compliance programmes don’t function in a vacuum; they depend on a broader social contract and the assumption that rules apply to everyone, that cutting corners carries real risk, that integrity is still a competitive advantage rather than a naive constraint. When people watch the most powerful actors in the economic and political system disregard that contract openly, it becomes harder to make the case internally. Not just for one company, but rather for the entire business ecosystem.

So, long story short: I do not have a clean answer to that question, and I think that is precisely what makes it the hardest challenge in compliance today. You can update your policies for new regulation. You can’t easily update a culture that is watching its reference points shift in real time. What I try to do instead is bring it back to something more durable than any individual example: we don’t act with integrity because someone else does. We do it because it is who we are as an organisation, and because the reputational and legal risk of abandoning that does not disappear just because the environment around us gets noisier. It is not about the outside noise. It is about each and every one of us. Holding that line — even when it is unfashionable — is exactly the kind of leadership compliance now demands.

What is the most overlooked skill or mindset that today’s in-house lawyers need to succeed at the highest level?

The most overlooked skill isn’t a skill at all. It’s a mindset shift. Recognising that, at the top, the job was never really about the law. Technical excellence gets you in the room. Yet it does not determine what happens once you are there. The lawyers who succeed at the highest level understand that their real work is building a network across regions and functions within their own organisation and outside it, and using it to establish trust that outlasts any single transaction, dispute or crisis.

That trust is not built in the room where you need it. It’s built long before, in, sometimes, unglamorous moments that have nothing to do with legal risk: sitting in on a supply chain call just to understand the business, learning how a regional sales team actually talks to customers, being the person who follows up on someone else’s problem without being asked. This is what turns you into the counsel who is part of the conversation before a decision is made and not after. Senior leadership now wants you in that conversation not because you will have answers instantly, but because they trust how you will handle whatever they throw at you.

That’s the shift that gets overlooked. Legal training rewards precision and risk-spotting. Those instincts serve you well as a mid-level lawyer but stop being the differentiator once you’re leading. At the top, you are rarely the smartest person on the specific legal question anymore; you have specialists for that. Your value is whether people trust your judgement enough to bring you in early, and whether your network lets you move information and build alignment across a business that does not organise itself around legal risk. The law is the entry fee. The relationships and the trust are what let you actually lead.