Team size: 5

What key trends should in-house counsel be monitoring over the next six to twelve months?

In periods of geopolitical, economic and technological uncertainty, I believe the legal team has a key role to play by remaining consistent, calm and professional. Uncertainty should not lower our standards. On the contrary, it makes it even more important for the legal function to provide reliable, pragmatic and well-structured advice.

In a turbulent environment, the legal team must act as a stable point of reference for the rest of the organisation, particularly for investment and business teams. Our role is to help them continue achieving their objectives while identifying risks, framing decisions clearly and ensuring that execution remains secure. This means being solution-oriented, but also maintaining discipline and legal rigour.

The same approach applies to technological change. As mentioned in relation to AI, new technologies offer significant opportunities, but they must be assessed with realism and proper governance. It is important not to be driven by overenthusiasm or short-term trends. We have seen examples of companies making aggressive workforce reductions in the belief that AI would immediately replace large parts of their teams, only to later discover that tokens also have a cost — and that, in some cases, this cost may be higher or less predictable than expected. This is a useful reminder that technology should be implemented thoughtfully, with a clear understanding of its benefits, limits and economics.

Overall, my approach is to help the organisation navigate uncertainty by keeping a clear head, maintaining high professional standards and supporting other teams with practical, reliable advice. In difficult periods, the legal team should strengthen the organisation by being steady, constructive and focused on long-term value.

How have you implemented AI within your legal team to improve efficiency while maintaining quality and governance – and keeping the human element?

AI represents a significant opportunity for legal teams, particularly in terms of efficiency, standardisation and knowledge management. However, we also recognise that it creates important risks, especially around data security, confidentiality, GDPR compliance and, where relevant, DORA-related requirements.

For this reason, our approach has been cautious and pragmatic. Rather than adopting broad, uncontrolled AI tools, we have started by implementing simple, separate and dedicated AI solutions for specific legal use cases, notably the drafting of recurrent documents and the preparation of first drafts or templates. These tools are designed to support the team on repetitive tasks while maintaining appropriate controls and human review.

We see this as a first step. Based on these initial solutions, we intend to continue working with the company’s management and compliance teams to unlock dedicated resources and, where appropriate, more powerful and secure LLM-based tools. The objective would be to build a controlled set of solutions that simplify our internal processes, improve turnaround times and reduce time spent on low-value repetitive work.

The human element remains central to our approach. At this stage, AI is conceived as a tool to assist the legal team, not as a way to replace it. Legal analysis, judgment, negotiation and accountability remain with lawyers. Our objective is to improve the team’s capacity, quality and responsiveness while avoiding unnecessary growth or inflation of the legal function.