Team size: 12

As we enter the next decade, what skills will a corporate legal team need to succeed in the modern in-house industry?

We will continue to see increasing complexity in domestic and international statutory and regulatory frameworks as sectoral requirements are addressed and caught up to, and overlapping domains are applied across sectors.

Strong analytical and logical reasoning, applying legal principles to substantive requirements, and earning a seat at the table will be needed to navigate this complexity.

A cooperative partnership among internal legal teams in an organisation and between internal legal teams and external counsel will be key priorities that teams must keep on the agenda. External partnerships will need to be multi-pronged to address complex legal change and transactions on the one hand, with appropriate frameworks to deal with the steady state and with standardised work on the other. This is so that the team, at its core, has the capacity to strategically and effectively address the parts that make up the big picture. Keep that picture in mind and be prepared to face the reality that it will morph and change rapidly.

Legal teams must continue to grow their partnerships with business products and transactional and operations partners and lead rather than follow. Robust industry input to draft frameworks will be called for. The agility to apply domain skills to varied scenarios will be much needed.

What is the biggest risk facing your industry now and how are you preparing your organisation to deal with this?

The complexity of evolving law and regulation is a significant risk, as are uncertain outcomes from litigation that set precedents and define risk setting and articulation. Legal functions strongly focus on navigating this uncertainty by attaching to commercial decisions and frameworks, requisite attention to prudence and detail, and fallbacks where relevant and applicable.

The unusual business environment created by the pandemic has been swiftly followed by the Ukraine crisis, attendant supply chain costs rising, and rising inflation. Are you now putting more emphasis on preparing for the unforeseen, and, if so, what does this entail?

The changing nature of the financial services industry, coupled with the increasing complexity of regulation, customer expectations, disruptions and the need for contractual safeguards against those, serve up a path into the future whose contours are, at best vague.

The resilience required to handle what is current effectively is increasingly having to be balanced with the agility to flex to deal with new developments and opportunities that may not be fully formed. At the same time, controls must be factored in. Fallbacks also have to be thought through to deal with potential disruptions from events that are global.

Not everything is clear, to begin with, and some aspects of developments and even legal frameworks can be somewhat nuanced. All of this calls for a considerable amount of interpretative skill as well, which needs to be thoughtful, measured and informed by the relevant background. Yet, lawyers must be able to respond adequately to needs within reasonable time frames.