Team size: Three

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crises, and how does your legal strategy align with the broader business strategy to ensure organisational resilience?

In private equity, instability rarely announces itself in advance – it shows up as a regulatory change affecting a portfolio company, a counterparty dispute mid-transaction, or a macro shock that forces us to revisit deal terms we thought were settled. My approach starts from a simple premise: legal risk and business risk are the same risk, viewed from different desks. I try not to let the legal function operate as a separate checkpoint that business decisions pass through at the end – instead, I’m involved early enough in investment committee discussions, portfolio company board matters and financing decisions that legal considerations shape the strategy rather than react to it.

During genuinely disruptive periods – and we’ve had a few, from interest rate shifts affecting portfolio company leverage to regulatory changes in specific sectors – the priority is triage: identifying which exposures are existential versus manageable, and being honest with the investment team about that distinction rather than treating every risk as equally urgent. I also lean heavily on documentation discipline built in calmer times – having clean contractual positions, clear governance records and well-understood covenant structures means that when pressure hits, we’re negotiating from a position of clarity rather than scrambling to understand our own exposure.

Organisational resilience, to me, is less about having a crisis playbook and more about having built a legal function that business colleagues already trust and consult naturally – so that when something goes wrong, legal is already in the room rather than being called in afterwards.

How do you see AI and automation reshaping the legal profession, and how are you leveraging technology in your own legal team?

The shift I’ve noticed isn’t that AI replaces legal judgement – it’s that it’s compressing the time between having a question and having a first-pass answer, which changes what in-house lawyers spend their time on. Tasks that used to consume hours – reviewing a first draft NDA, building a conditions-precedent checklist for a transaction, checking a document set for consistency – can now be handled in a fraction of the time, freeing capacity for the analysis and negotiation that actually requires legal judgement.

I’ve been building this into how our legal function works day to day: automating recurring due diligence and closing checklists for M&A transactions, using AI tools to accelerate first-pass contract review and standardising how we produce internal presentations and reporting so the team spends less time on formatting and more on substance. The harder part isn’t the technology – it’s redesigning workflows so the tools are actually embedded in how the team operates, not bolted on as a side experiment.

Where I’d urge caution is treating AI output as a finished legal position rather than a draft. In a private equity context, where documents carry real economic consequences, the value of these tools is in speed and first-draft quality – the accountability for the final position stays exactly where it always has: with the lawyer.