Team size: Eleven

What has been the number one challenge that has impacted you over the past year?

In a market context of local sustainability challenges, low unemployment and navigating the start of what looks to be protracted periods of over 5% inflation, maintaining momentum towards achieving ambitious ESG targets set by Nestlé globally has been difficult. This environment is challenging to a leadership team who has not faced such levels of inflationary pressure in their careers, nor levels of scrutiny on the pursuit and achievement of ESG commitments.

Looking forward, what technological advancements do you feel will impact the role of in-house legal teams in the future the most?

Continuing technological advancements in legal service delivery will require in-house lawyers to work alongside their business partners and thoroughly understand their organisation’s strategy and objectives. Technology solutions over the next five years will, for many legal service deliverables, offer an alternative to the in-house lawyer. Therefore, they need to be ready to embrace and leverage this change, while remaining a key part of facilitating sustainable business growth for their company.

In terms of technology, contract automation will rapidly develop and become increasingly easy to set up and intuitive in its performance. This will increase the range of contracts and level of complexity that can be managed through contract automation. Similarly, technology for document review will become more sophisticated. Currently, its use is largely restricted to due diligence in M&A and discovery in litigation. In the future, I expect its role to expand into more everyday contractual review. The emergence of AI and systems such as ChatGPT will shift the way in-house legal teams operate in the future, reducing the need for legal research and reliance on legal knowledge and sophistication and increasing the importance of strategic legal business partnering.

Inflation and further technological improvements for remote working, will magnify the existing pressure on international out-shoring and call for the reimagination of operating models for in-house legal teams. To retain relevance at this critical time, in-house lawyers will need to trade on relationships, adding value and helping their employer win in the market.

What would you say are the unique qualities required to be successful as an in-house lawyer in your industry?

An in-house lawyer in FMCG needs to truly understand our customers and consumers, be passionate about our products and be eager to operate with real purpose. What they do and achieve must be as important as how they do it. Relationships and business partnering is everything – internally and externally – it is all about true collaboration. An FMCG lawyer must provide advice with a focus on competitive intensity and responsible risk taking. They need to comfortably operate in the grey, managing risk and ambiguity in a complex and uncertain environment. Lawyers in our industry need to be courageous and influential, at times acting as the company’s moral compass and custodian of its principles. Our lawyers also need to be willing to get involved in emerging changing areas of law and policy, strive to make a difference and lay foundations for future success and social responsibility.