Team size: Seven

What are the most significant cases or transactions that you have recently been involved in?

My team engages in a very broad legal practice. We represent the company in all areas of the business, including employment matters, intellectual property matters, privacy and security issues, commercial transactions large and small, and everything in between. We handle nearly all the work in-house with the exception of litigation and mergers and acquisitions in which we play a very large role as the liaison with the business teams.

As we enter the next decade, what skills will a corporate legal team need to succeed in the modern in-house industry?

A successful corporate legal team needs to be very commercially oriented and become fluent in the details of the business, understanding how the business operates within every department. It is critical to have that in-depth knowledge of the business in order to sit side-by-side with the business leaders. A successful corporate legal team needs to anticipate problems and clear the way to help our business leaders to meet those goals. This includes taking measures to mitigate risk and not being afraid to provide your opinion even if it is not a popular one. The modern corporate lawyer needs to have the ability to talk to people in every part of the business from an employee on the factory floor, to a software engineer, to the CEO. We need to be seen as the example of integrity and ethical behaviour.

What are some of the main legislative or regulatory changes that have impacted you?

We have been significantly impacted by the Section 301 tariffs on goods coming from China; our entire industry has been impacted by such tariffs. While that has settled down to some extent, it has changed the way we think about how and where we will manufacture our products going forward. We have also been impacted by the sanctions instituted by the US and the UK on Russia. Ultimately, we made the decision to stop doing business in Russia and to liquidate our entity there as a result of the ever-increasing minefield of sanctions imposed on companies with operations in Russia. We are also constantly monitoring the ever-changing landscape of privacy regulations. We collect personally identifiable information from our customers and, as such, we are constantly reviewing our privacy and security practices based on the increasing and changing privacy regulations around the globe. We have taught our business partners to involve our legal team at the ideation stage of any new product to ensure that we build our products with privacy in mind, and we are always reviewing our policies to ensure that we are complying with existing legislation but also to ensure that we are operating with best practices in mind.