Team size: 4

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

As the General Counsel for Ernst & Young AS in Norway (EY Norway), I lead a dedicated team of three lawyers, including myself, along with one administrative associate. Our primary role is to provide comprehensive legal support and advise to EY Norway’s CEO, leadership team and board of directors, as well as to all personnel within the organisation.

Our responsibilities span a wide range of areas, including regulatory matters, business restructuring, client and vendor contracting and negotiations, claims management, data privacy, anti-money laundering (AML) compliance and complex HR and partner matters. Given the size of our legal team, compared to more than 2,300 partners and employees, we adopt a risk-based approach in our day-to-day work. We prioritise the continuous development and implementation of guidelines, policies and templates, while also providing training and information, to ensure compliance and mitigate business risks.

EY Norway is a globally connected, multidisciplinary professional services organisation, encompassing several companies, which include auditors, accountants, business and technology consultants and lawyers. We hold several authorisations from the Financial Supervisory Authority of Norway (NFSA) and The Supervisory Council for Legal Practice and are committed to ongoing development and restructuring. The main focus for the general counsel is to advise and assist leadership and the business in navigating complex legal issues considering regulatory, legal and reputational risks.

Over the past twelve months I have been involved in several significant projects, including the establishment of a new EY company within financial services and internal restructuring initiatives, including the sale of thirteen local EY offices to Cedra.

As the world continues to face geopolitical, technological and economic uncertainty, how do you manage legal risk while still prioritising commercial objectives?

EY is one of the world’s leading centres of expertise in auditing and advisory services. Our work covers assurance, tax, strategy and transactions and consulting services with nearly 400 000 employees in more than 150 countries and territories. Further, the audit and advisory industry in Norway is strictly regulated with several statutory controls and procedures.

As such, in addition to effects on local business, EY Norway is engaged in a comprehensive number of cross-border engagements, affected by different geopolitical, technological and economic risks within different jurisdictions.

In my experience, in-house counsel that can quantify, contextualise and prioritise risk in a language that resonates with commercial colleagues are far better positioned to influence outcomes. In uncertain environments, advice that helps the business understand the range of outcomes and enables the business to make risk-based decisions, and suggest alternative solutions is more valuable than just pointing out that something is risky. It also means knowing when to escalate to external advisers and when to act decisively with internal resources.

As AI becomes increasingly integrated into legal teams, and the pressure grows to ‘do more with less’, how can GC balance efficiency, quality and human judgement?

The “do more with less” pressure is real, not only for GCs, but also across all levels of the business. A risk for GCs is that efficiency becomes a proxy for quality, but AI should be used to create capacity for higher-value human work, rather than simply to reduce headcount. This means investing in making the legal team equipped with skills to actively use AI tools in an efficient and correct manner. The legal team should not only be trained in how to use AI tools, but also in how to critically evaluate their outputs. Further, our experience has shown that selecting the appropriate type of AI tool for the specific task is critical to achieve real value.

The starting point is to be clear-eyed about what AI does well and where human judgment remains irreplaceable. AI excels at volume tasks such as document review, contract analysis, research and template generation, but it cannot replicate contextual judgment, ethical reasoning, or the relational intelligence that underpins effective legal advice.