Team size: 29

Looking forward, what technological advancements do you feel will impact the role of in-house legal teams in the future the most?

The pandemic has dramatically changed a lot of processes for ordinary legal teams and boosted greatly the efficiency along with the flexibility of team members. Cloud technologies for archives, and paperless processes are already usual for all in-house teams. No surprise, but efficiency and speed are core metrics for a business evaluating its legal team. Therefore, I believe there is two streams. First, a full integration of legal function in digital and making it in a measurable way at task managers like Asana or Trello. This will allow emphasising the value of the legal team in business language and change perception from a cost centre, to cost saving centre of the organization. Second, a deeper integration of legal function with AI and machine learning will impact most in-house teams. This will reshape the composition of the teams for sure.

What is a cause, business related or otherwise, that you care about, and why?

As an in-house lawyer, my focus is to back up the business in any possible way and assist it in achieving success. Hence my current role with a focus on M&A is my passion, as investing and selling projects allows the business to fully flourish, by either acquiring a promising business or transferring it to move forward. Within M&A, I love the entire process of deal guidance along with simplifying the legal documents for the end-user.

What would you say are the unique qualities required to be successful as an in-house lawyer in your industry?

The core switch which all successful in-house lawyers have done is to switch to a business adviser. We are no longer required just to perform legal functions, drafting or handing legal cases in courts, as now in-house legal functions have been widened to managing business and reputational risks, along with legal risk management. Therefore, our legalese must be eliminated, and we must effectively collaborate with our business partners. Fruitful balanced cooperation, of cross-function without breaking anything, is a key measure of success for in-house legal teams.

What can law firms do to improve their service to the legal department?

In my opinion, they can adopt transparency in the process of performing the service, introduce a knowledge-sharing approach and keep improving their digital products, particularly for M&A and dispute resolution teams, for which even simple user-friendly archive for sorting documents is a game changer in collaboration with the firm.