Team size: 3

What are the key projects that you have been involved in over the past twelve months?

Over the past twelve months, I have been involved in a joint development and commercial partnership project to recreate a third-party groupware, originally designed to operate on Google Workspace, so that it can function within Microsoft 365. This project required an atypical structure combining both co-development and a sales alliance.

My role was to work closely with the business team to identify, structure and resolve key legal and commercial issues. These included the allocation and ownership of underlying intellectual property, the design of the commercial model (including fee arrangements under the partnership) and the treatment of rights and obligations upon end-of-life (EOL) or termination.

The most challenging aspect was negotiating the framework for unwinding the relationship. A purely legal position was insufficient to reach agreement with the counterparty. To overcome this, I supplemented the legal analysis with practical, scenario-based reasoning about how such a termination would realistically unfold in business terms. This approach helped bridge the gap between the parties and ultimately led to a mutually acceptable agreement, enabling the successful launch of the partnership.

What are the key trends that in-house counsel should be monitoring over the coming months?

One of the most important trends is the rapidly evolving legal landscape surrounding AI agents. As AI systems become more autonomous and embedded in business operations, legal issues are expanding beyond traditional data protection and intellectual property concerns to include accountability, decision-making authority and regulatory compliance frameworks.

In-house counsel should closely monitor how different jurisdictions approach the regulation of AI-driven decision-making, as well as contractual allocation of risks between companies deploying such systems and their vendors. The intersection of AI governance, liability and operational control will become increasingly critical.

What are the most important attributes for a modern in-house counsel to possess?

In an environment where AI is inevitably integrated into business processes, modern in-house counsel must develop a structural understanding of legal and regulatory frameworks and be able to translate that understanding into well-designed operational processes.

This includes the ability to give precise and effective instructions to AI tools, which requires not only legal expertise, but also process design capability. Rather than focusing solely on issue-spotting, in-house lawyers are increasingly expected to architect workflows in which legal judgment is embedded, scalable and partially automated.

Are there any upcoming challenges that in-house teams should be preparing for over the next twelve months?

The automation of in-house legal work through AI will accelerate further. To enable this transformation, organisations will need to invest in structuring and standardising their internal legal data, including the systematic organisation of historical contracts and the development of playbooks for common agreement types.

In addition, legal teams will need to articulate and document their workflows in a way that allows certain tasks to be delegated to AI agents. A key challenge will be determining the appropriate division of responsibilities between humans and AI, particularly when AI is also used for legal research. Improving the precision of this allocation, deciding what must remain human-led versus what can be automated, will be critical to achieving both efficiency and risk control.