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Editor’s note: This interview was conducted prior to March 2020.

What techniques do you use to provide commercially-focused advice to your company, and how do you communicate these to more junior lawyers in the team?

All legal and contracts services must have as an objective to bring value to the company while making sure that governance rules inside and outside the company are implemented, monitored and above all becomes part of business processes. Participation in management and technical meetings is essential, but first you have to understand and master your company products and services. If you apply all these principles risk management will be much easier to manage.

FOCUS ON: Pressure on legal contracts departments

Pressure on legal and contracts departments is constantly increasing mainly due to two factors:

1. financial pressure from management both on costs of function and outside counsel fees, legal and contracts department is one of the few support functions within a company where costs has not drastically decreased over the last 10 years and;

2. laws, regulations and governance requirements are increasing exponentially.

The combination of those two factors puts heavy pressure on legal and contracts departments, mistakes and non-compliances are very costly. In addition to the traditional transactional, IP and litigation work we are now facing on a day to day basis issues related to: environment, anti-corruption, data privacy, cyber security, trade controls, extra territorial application of foreign laws, multi-jurisdictional environment and anti-trust, to name a few. To alleviate this pressure legal and contracts departments must rely on other functions. Procurement, sales and marketing, HR, operations and IT must be trained to have the ability to raise issues and red flags early on to avoid problems and non-compliances as well as to have the basic legal knowledge to perform their tasks without having to go to Legal or have their tasks regularly reviewed by legal.

In addition to the above we have to respect our budget, foster innovation within the department, bring each member of our team to another level and keep them engage in an environment where demand is strong for legal and contracts candidates in North America.

All of the above has to be performed and managed within a framework of risk management, legal and contracts program management and business growth and profitability.