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

Over the past year, I led a cross-border team of European legal experts in structurally realigning and modernising our legal department to navigate the rapidly escalating regulatory complexities in the air transport and logistics sectors. This transformation focused on proactively addressing emerging challenges within labour compliance, AI governance, and IT procurement frameworks, successfully adapting our operational model to safeguard the enterprise during swift technological and legislative shifts.

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

I ensure that my team manage legal aspects during instability or crisis by adopting a dynamic, agile approach. My team is embedded into the business units to ensure rapid, short-term decision-making that protects the company, balancing the legal requirements with the business needs through a proceed of mature and shared risk-based approach. I dynamically allocate legal resources using a strict risk-based framework focused on high-exposure liabilities — such as liquidity, supply chain disruption, and critical regulatory hurdles — deprioritising low-impact administrative compliance to eliminate resource drain.

General counsel often speak of the need to be strategic to reach the pinnacle of the profession. What does being strategic mean to you?

For me, being strategic means shifting the legal department’s role from a defensive cost centre to a 100% business enabler and driver of enterprise value; this first requires cultivating a deep, end-to-end understanding of the company’s business – from ground-level operations to sales and marketing – coupled with the sharp financial acumen needed to master commercial challenges, and secondly, the leadership capacity to cascade these skills to the legal team by investing heavily in our highest-potential talent to build a high-performance culture of true business partners.

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?

Our digital transformation strategy prioritises strict compliance with domestic and EU data protection frameworks as a fundamental pillar. Integrating AI tools into the legal department requires a careful balance: we must safeguard the institutional expertise of our senior attorneys through targeted literacy programmes while preventing over-reliance on these technologies by junior team members. To ensure younger collaborators do not use generative tools as a substitute for foundational legal knowledge, we enforce strict guardrails, including mandatory, line-by-line verification protocols against primary sources. Ultimately, we position AI strictly as an analytical thinking partner, not a surrogate team member.