Legal team size: 116

Major legal advisers/ external counsel: Paul Weiss; A&O Shearman; Dentons; Ropes & Gray; Hogan Lovells; Skadden; Jackson, Lewis; CMS; Fried Frank; Proskauer Rose

What are the projects that you are most proud of working on over the past 12 months?

We have focused a great deal of time and attention on issues relating to the use of news and other creative content for training and retrieval by Artificial Intelligence and search. This has included advocacy, litigation and licensing work as well as exploring the use of AI in the legal department and across the organisation.

We also advise our news businesses on a daily basis on newsgathering and access matters and have participated in a number of amicus briefs supporting greater transparency.

We were proud of our role in the IPO of Reddit last year. Advance is the largest shareholder in Reddit, and it was once a wholly owned subsidiary. This transaction was a huge success for Reddit shareholders, including Advance and the legal group assisted in many aspects of the transaction. The IPO was one of the most important IPOs of the year.

We were also involved in numerous corporate transactions, from smaller venture capital investments to very large growth investments. Advance was also involved in the business combination of Charter Communications and Liberty Media Corporation and we had significant involvement in the transaction.

We also resolved favorably shareholder litigation related to the merger of Warner Brothers and Discovery, another transaction in which we played a significant and successful role.

Based on your experiences in the past year, are there any trends in the legal or business world that you are keeping an eye on that you think other in-house lawyers should be mindful of?

In the face of quickly changing legal norms, I believe there is a tremendous amount of uncertainty right now and legal norms are changing quickly. For example, news organisations have been sued and investigated for truthful reporting. This is a great deal of manipulation of social media and it can be hard to dispel falsity, which grows quickly and exponentially. Challenges to existing legal norms make it very difficult to do our jobs, which fundamentally are about predicting legal outcomes.

What are the key things you prioritise to get the most out of your team?

Ours is a very complicated business environment with many operating businesses. We encourage our lawyers to understand the businesses they work with and to be great partners who work with humility, confidence and curiosity as lawyers and businesspeople themselves. Our lawyers must achieve the right balance of risk and business results in environments that are often unclear. We also ask our lawyers to think through all the steps toward implementing a strategy, rather than just advising on the legal outcome. We also encourage our lawyers to be in involved professional and pro bono associations to gain access to expertise and connections that aren’t limited to our companies.