Team size: 7

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

Elkem has recently announced the sale of most of its silicone entities to its former majority owner, based on a share redemption arrangement with closing planned for end of April this year. The Elkem Legal team has played a crucial role in the success and timely conclusion of this transaction, not least by drafting and negotiating contracts, supporting board/management decision making and managing outside counsel in multiple jurisdictions.

The Legal team also spends substantial efforts on supporting the business in maneuvering rapidly changing trade-related restrictions, such as sanctions, tariffs and the EU safeguard measures implemented for non-EU ferrosilicon late last year.

My team has continuously advised the business and provided group-wide frameworks and processes, including contract clauses and escalation controls, to reduce and manage the risk associated with such trade restrictions.

These achievements in addition to our daily support to all parts of Elkem’s business, including making sure all our contracts are drafted in the best interest of Elkem and avoiding costly disputes, have led the Elkem Legal team to receive the best feedback of all time in our annual internal performance survey conducted earlier this year.

As the in-house role continues to evolve from legal advisor to business partner, what strategies have you found most effective for stakeholder management and aligning legal advice with business strategy?

First and foremost, you need to develop a Legal strategy and make sure that the objectives and goals are aligned with and support those of the business. In my experience, this is most effectively achieved through workshops and interviews with key commercial stakeholders, and regular follow-up meetings with such stakeholders and management to ensure strategy effectiveness. In addition, I send out a survey to all internal stakeholders once a year to get feedback on performance including availability and quality of legal advice, and I use the average score of the survey as one of my main KPIs for performance. My management particularly appreciates this KPI, as it is measurable and shows development and improvement potential over time.

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?

AI is a paradigm shift for the Legal function, using language as our primary tool. To remain relevant and keep up the pace, Legal teams must learn how to integrate responsible AI usage in all workstreams, and our focus will shift from large data review to outcome review and more strategic thinking moving forward. The expectations from our clients to deliver faster and with less resources will increase accordingly.

While AI obviously provides enormous advantages in terms of speeding up legal work, we also see the challenges. The outcome can be unreliable without rigorous legal validation against trusted sources and professional judgement.

In the longer term, extensive AI usage may also shape our ability to do the work ourselves. I believe this is even more important for younger and less experienced lawyers, particularly those who have had access to AI tools since the beginning of their career. More senior lawyers must therefore not only learn how AI can and should be used for legal work, but also how to mentor junior lawyers to get the necessary experience that the AI tools cannot yet provide, and maybe never will.

I am looking forward to learning more about how legal teams will advise non-legal colleagues with regards to using AI capabilities to solve legal issues themselves moving forward, and to what extent this should be allowed or even encouraged by the legal teams. For now, I am very clear in my advice that AI may come in addition to, but never as a replacement for, legal advice. However, I do expect that more and more low-risk routine tasks can – and should – be solved with AI without legal involvement moving forward.