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Christian Sommer has been heavily involved in updating the way in which projects are supported within the Vodafone Group in recent months, with this endeavour ranking among his most strategically important actions on behalf of the team in that time: ‘The introduction of a triaging system supporting agile projects has completely changed the way in-house legal support is provided in certain areas. This has changed the way I approach legal support for complex IT transformation projects completely. In addition, the introduction and continuous growth of a near-shore legal shared service centre team has proved instrumental in helping Vodafone to deal with several thousand commercial agreements in an efficient and effective way’. Sommer believes that digitalisation will cause a revolution in in-house legal affairs going forward. ‘The in-house role will undergo a seismic shift over the next five to ten years’, he says. ‘The introduction of AI and machine learning will fundamentally change the role of the commercial legal in-house support needed, not just in terms of numbers of lawyers but also relating to the kind of support. The skills needed to be a successful in-house legal expert will differ from what is needed now quite a bit. Tech understanding will become a must-have skill rather than a luxury. Contract negotiations will become automated processes (in certain areas) using IT platforms with no legal support needed anymore.