About

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

I was involved in negotiation of a contract with Keanu Reeves on his starring as a major role in CYBERPUNK 2077 video game – one of the most commented news in the video game industry this year.

I negotiated distribution agreements for CYBERPUNK 2077 video game with several entities, including Warner Bros Home Entertainment for North America and with Bandai Namco for selected European markets.

What changes have you made to the workings of the legal department during your time in your current role? How has that affected the wider company?

I was hired almost five years ago to support CD PROJEKT business team in daily operations. This quickly expanded into managing a six-person legal team, responsible for business, litigation, transactions, privacy, regulatory and many others. As our organisation has a very flat structure, we manage our own projects, set up or improve already existing pipelines and in many cases we go far beyond what would be expected from a regular lawyer. We included the legal team in marketing and development pipelines, we reorganised the role of lawyers from distant legal advisors to something I would call “legal facilitators of operations”. We have taken over many formal burdens from our producers so that they can concentrate on their regular work.

As to the effects, I believe the biggest effect was the trust of the employees that we gained – not only executives and business, but also developers or the marketing team. I feel we are treated as people responsible for finding solutions between the regulations and not an obstacle to their work. But apart from this, I believe CD PROJEKT is currently much better organised and has a much higher degree of understanding of legal complexities in our field. We also receive messages from our fans who praise our terms of services and privacy policies for its clear and user-friendly language.

How important have “soft skills” or personal attributes outside of technical legal skill been to the team’s success, and which “soft skills” do you feel are most important for an in-house lawyer to possess?

They have been very, very important. Of course, if you want to be a senior counsel, you will not succeed if you are not a good specialist in your field. However, in the in-house work legal stuff is only part of the work that you need to do. You need to understand how your business operates, you need to teamwork, be flexible and open about any changes that occur nearly every day. In addition, and that’s very important – you need to be good communicating bad news such as: “I know you want to do it, but from the legal standpoint it is not possible”.

What are the most important considerations you have when recruiting new team members?

As we usually say: We are looking for smart people with grit and good knowledge of English – all the rest can be learnt at CD PROJEKT. This is generally true, as the legal profession nowadays is more about ability to research and “to connect the dots” than to remember regulations and judgments. If someone is passionate about video game industry it gives me a reasonable expectation he/she will be enthusiastic about the work and will put a lot of effort into learning. In addition, as we work with people of different characters, backgrounds and from different cultures, social skills are very important. If someone is competitive and humble in the same time, he/she has a chance to be our top choice.

If you had to give advice to an aspiring in-house lawyer or GC what would it be and why?

Learn your business. Manage your projects. Be humble.

Focus on… the future

Today legal departments need lawyers. But what about tomorrow?

As the businesses and technologies develop quicker than expected, it is thrilling to observe how these constant changes will affect the future of in-house lawyers.

20 years ago there were many in-house legal departments that concentrated mainly on administration and passing legal analysis from external law firms to the executives or interested departments. These teams were small, often isolated and not very much interested in business. I remember that when I began my work as a lawyer 10 years ago, an in-house position in Poland was still considered by my colleagues as a nice place to retire, but not a good place to learn anything.

Nowadays we can see that in-house teams grow and behave just like law firms, with this distinction that they are working just for one, dedicated client. These lawyers know the business and make a difference by always being more specialised in the topic than even the best outside counsel. In fact, many companies do not outsource legal work anymore – apart from issues that are absolutely peripheral for the business.

This was yesterday. Tomorrow, or maybe even today, we will have AI that can do most of the analysis, that can assess the risks and show which clauses should be further negotiated and which may remain in the contract. I can imagine that in some time the success of negotiation could be dependent on the strength of the software that I will be using. But in such a case, would I need qualified lawyers in my team anymore? Can’t a member of my administration team, after, let’s say, studies in archaeology (with much smaller salary), run the software to check the NDA draft we received from our contractor, and to do this will not need anything more than a three-week legal course?

There’s a lot of changes that the future brings to the table. Mediocrity or sticking to the current position of a lawyer in companies will most likely mean professional extinction. To survive, we need to go where the AI cannot go today: Specialisation, combining business knowledge with regulatory awareness (this may be a very strong asset on the executive level), project management and working more and more with people inside of the company.