Team size: 8 direct reports

What are the most significant cases, projects and/or transactions that you and/or your legal team have recently been involved in?

Over the past year, I, along with our Corporate, Digital & Sustainability legal team (8 lawyers), have supported a broad portfolio of board governance, corporate transactions, digital risk, and sustainability programs.

Representative highlights include: within the corporate office, end-to-end organisation of Supervisory Board and Audit Committee cycles, including annual calendars, strategic agenda-setting, pre-reads, minutes and resolutions (including written consent/circulars) to ensure timely decision-making and regulatory compliance. Introduction of a new board management software to prepare and conduct board meetings digitally and more efficiently.

On the corporate side, managed Annual General Meeting and shareholder engagement, i.e., managed convocation, agenda preparation and disclosure package; coordinated with proxy advisors and investors; virtual meeting enablers.

Provided corporate support for strategic transactions, such as acquisition in the healthcare sector and a carve-out in electronics.

Supported cyber readiness and incident response (e.g. playbooks and drills), supporting the company-wide implementation of the NIS2-Directive, establishing an AI Working Group and AI literacy program for Legal as well as drafting AI schedule for business contracts

On the sustainability side, ensured CSRD/ESRS readiness by supporting materiality assessment, disclosure mapping, internal controls/assurance pathways, and cross-functional reporting governance

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

We stay ahead of geopolitical and regulatory developments to provide proactive guidance to our business stakeholders; I ensure our advice is pragmatic, risk-balanced, and culminates in clear decisions.

What strategies do you employ to ensure the successful digital transformation of a legal department while maintaining compliance with your country’s data protection laws?

We make it easy for our legal department to adopt the right tools — and just as easy to do so compliantly — by building privacy and security into the intake, rollout, and daily use, and by investing in our team’s AI and legal-tech fluency. For maintaining compliance, we have launched the AI literacy program for our legal department and offer trainings. We communicate frequently about new legal-tech developments and emphasise use-case sharing, e.g., our “Prompt of the Week” postings and a curated internal library.

Have you had any experiences during your career as a lawyer that stand out as particularly unique or interesting?

Being an intern in a law firm in Mombasa, Kenya, including visits to the local courts.

Given the current geopolitical shifts and growing uncertainties around international free trade, has your company’s risk profile evolved, and are you taking measures to address these challenges?

Our risk profile has evolved in light of heightened geopolitical tensions — particularly between the US and China — and increasing uncertainty around free trade. We address this by proactively monitoring regulatory developments, engaging through roundtables and peer exchanges, and translating insights into e.g., scenario plans and contractual protections.

Based on your experiences in the past year, what trends in the legal or business landscape are you closely monitoring, and why do you believe they are particularly relevant for emerging senior in-house leaders?

We are closely monitoring AI governance, cybersecurity resilience developments, ESG/supply-chain due diligence, capital-markets disclosure, and cloud/SaaS contracting. Due to our legal field, we feel that we need to be ahead of trends in these fields to ensure that we can turn any insights gained into practical guardrails and playbooks for legal and business colleagues.

As a rising leader within your organisation, how do you help foster a corporate culture that supports ESG principles and promotes compliance across all levels of the business?

We prioritise lower-carbon choices: travel only when business-critical and favouring rail where feasible. We have legally supported the drafting of our climate transition plan to translate ambition into accountable targets and actions.

AI has long been discussed as a transformative force in the legal industry. From your perspective as an emerging in-house leader, has AI meaningfully influenced the way you or your team works?

Yes, absolutely. AI simplifies workflows (e.g. translations, summaries of long documents, support taking of minutes in board meetings, transcription). Using AI lets us deliver advice more efficiently and redirect capacity on impactful work.

Is there a cause, within or outside the business world, that you are particularly passionate about, and how has it shaped your approach as a future leader in the legal profession?

I am passionate about human-centered leadership — being inspiring, empathetic, and authentic — because it creates the trust and psychological safety needed for the team to function well and lead the team trough change and transformation.

What considerations guide your decision to engage external counsel versus managing matters internally, and how do you assess the value or performance of those external providers?

We engage external counsel based on risk, missing inhouse expertise, and sometimes capacity. We assess value on outcomes and risk reduction, timeliness, budget adherence, collaboration quality, and business acumen. We use Brightflag to monitor billing discipline, budgets, staffing, and performance.

In your role, how do you and your team contribute to advancing the company’s broader strategic objectives? Can you share an example of a recent initiative where your involvement created a significant impact?

A recent example is the drafting of a new executive board compensation system, drafted plan rules (KPIs, vesting, malus/clawback) and re-designed the long-term incentive to reflect investors’ feedback and to strengthen management’s focus on the long-term success of our company.

Looking ahead, which developments or challenges do you anticipate will shape the legal profession over the next 5–10 years, and how do you believe rising in-house leaders should prepare for them?

The compliant use of AI and the fast changing geopolitical and regulatory environment.