About

‘I think I have demonstrated that a corporate counsel can be much more than just a legal advisor to the company’, Olof Arnman says. ‘By stepping out of the traditional boundaries of the role, the corporate counsel can become an integral partner to the business in various commercial and strategic matters’. With almost 10 years’ in-house experience in the oil industry, Olof Arnman has successfully merged Grey Wolf Drilling’s legal and commercial departments. ‘I have ensured that the legal department has become an integral part of the business in general, and not just acting in an advisory role’, Arnman says. ‘Though my background is in the legal field, by taking on a dual role as “manager, legal and commercial”, I have broadened the scope of my department’s work’. Creating this synergy between the two was not always easy, Arnman explains. ‘It took some time to make internal stakeholders realise that a corporate counsel can be of value to the business outside of the scope of a legal advisor’, he says. ‘People tend to believe that lawyers should stick to the legal work. However, I have built trust over time and received buy-in from the business by consistently and successfully contributing to key non-legal deliverables’. In the view of those inside and outside his organisation, Arnman’s contribution to Grey Wolf’s incremental growth across the Middle East and CIS regions has been substantial. Sources interviewed particularly point to his role in negotiating high profile contracts. When it comes to outside counsel, Arnman stresses the need for a common-sense approach. ‘One challenge in the relationship between in-house advisors and external counsel can often be to find that balance, where the advice provided by outside counsel is neither so broad that it becomes too generic nor so detailed as to cover every possible or impossible legal risk’, he says. ‘While clear communication from in-house counsel is of high importance in finding such balance, it is also crucial that the outside counsel makes a sincere effort to understand the client’s business and put the legal aspects of a particular situation into a broader context’.