Linda Szegvari – GC Powerlist
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Central and Eastern Europe 2019

Energy and utilities

Linda Szegvari

Chief legal counsel | MET Hungary

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Central and Eastern Europe 2019

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Linda Szegvari

Chief legal counsel | MET Hungary

About

What are the most important transactions and litigations that you have been involved in during the last two years?

I am very happy and proud to have participated in the transaction where MET Group purchased Hungary’s largest natural gas distributor company in 2018. It was an exciting job and required superb teamwork.

What are the unique challenges of working as an in-house lawyer in Hungary?

One of the main changes I have witnessed during my career is the concentration of critical knowledge into large law firms. During my early years, it was more widely accepted that small firms with only a couple of people could manage significant transactions. However, the greater integration of the Hungarian market into the EU system has transformed this scene and larger businesses are now represented by experts from well-established firms. This has changed the way in-house lawyers should work as their main role shifted from having expertise in a wide range of legal areas towards managing complex legal problems with various third-party law firms.

What do you do personally to promote diversity and inclusion in your company? In your team?

In the last couple of years, I have started to change my view on how I try to understand my colleagues’ needs to improve my own cultural awareness. Instead of following the good old “treat others how you want to be treated” rule, I shifted my viewpoint and applied what has become the platinum rule: “treat others how they want to be treated”. I do not want to force my own beliefs on others as their diverse background may require completely different benefits, treatments or solutions to their own problems. Just taking this change into account helped me become a bridge between the many different “worlds” in our company.

What do you feel is the best way to get more women into in-house legal leadership positions?

I believe that in a company’s life it is beneficial to have women in leading positions as they approach problems in a more empathetic and gentle way. These skills are a crucial advantage for a company as they foster cultural diversity. On the other hand, I think that women should be more self-confident in taking leading roles and step ahead from the “good senior expert” position. I truly believe in the “women supporting women” principle when it comes to sharing my experiences and knowledge with female colleagues being at an earlier phase of their careers. MET Group also encourages such initiatives as the company is a founding member of the WONY association, a unique organisation supporting the growing professional community of women in the energy industry not only in Hungary, but also in the CEE region.

Do you use any “legal tech” products, and do you find them a helpful management device?

Unfortunately, we do not use any advanced legal tech system yet. However, due to the increasing amount of semi-repetitive legal documents we receive daily, we are planning to initiate an evaluation round of AI-powered legal tech (e.g., LegalShifter) to help us improve our efficiency.


FOCUS ON… DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT

From track-changes hell to managed document traceability.

During my 10 plus year-long career, I cannot count the number of multi-reply e-mails I have sent and received to/from my colleagues, pushing hard to hammer out all the bits-and-bytes of certain legal documents. Often the never-ending track-changes crashes Word and results in tedious merging of various versions and revisions.

“No more”, was my main driving force when I was appointed chief legal counsel at MET Hungary. Engineers at NASA and Silicon-Valley entrepreneurs are building rockets and spaceships using cloud-enabled, service-oriented approaches for collaborative work, so I am sure that we just need to adapt what the market can offer.

First, we evaluated what we can achieve by sending different versions of the same document via email. As we are able to manage the recipients using the “To” field, we inherently receive a versioning mechanism based on the timestamps of received e-mails and that the originator of a long thread is usually responsible for that given task.

What e-mail-thread based collaboration lacks is the ability to monitor the progress of the activity and understand the status of the document, to have an overview on all running activities, to have proper traceability between the authors and their submitted versions and to manage time and resources available.

To achieve an integrated solution to these problems, we have created a three-tier system with its accompanying execution process and services to support our legal workflow.

The chief legal manager is mainly responsible for three activities: transforming the business request into legal activities, allocating and monitoring accepted activities and managing the legal experts. We have focused to give proper support for the latter two activities as business requests are pouring in very different forms, thus no standardised solution would be flexible enough.

For managing both our legal activities and the responsible experts, we introduced a rising task management service that is in use by many players from all around the world. The key to our success was that we applied a simple process with respect to what and how information can be shared. The most important rules are the following: we are only allowed to allocate tasks to individual experts, we require recurring updates on the progress for each task; only allow linking necessary documents from our document storage; and we document all decisions made to any of the tasks-related activities.

On the next tier, legal experts execute the activities defined within their respective tasks allocated by the chief legal counsel. This job still requires a huge amount of work done within Word or other word processing systems. However, we implemented a process enforcing that all legal documents are managed in our document storage – and sending files in e-mails should be avoided at all costs.

Finally, stakeholders are involved through the approval process that has been digitalised within MET Hungary to achieve a zero-paper approval that includes a central service responsible for enforcing the necessary regulations and signing procedures derived from the corporate documents. We consider a legal activity closed when its approval process has been successfully ended.

In the end, all these services and processes provided us with a systematic, fine-grain traceability system allowing easier vertical scalability of the legal team to underpin the exponential growth within MET’s business lines. But we cannot stop improving ourselves as we have just managed to overcome our day-to-day problems and our next step will be to adapt advanced time and resource planning approaches to predict future workloads and bottlenecks.

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