What inspired you to pursue a career in law, and how did you develop an interest in becoming an in-house lawyer?

There are a lot of different elements that came together. One is that I was always interested in mediating when someone was arguing or helping out if I felt like people were not heard or being treated unfairly. What I realised is that I like to create win-win situations, not someone winning and someone losing, but really finding ways that everyone can benefit from the situation.

When it comes to talking about the tech side, a lot of it was about me always being interested in new trends, new technologies, new gadgets, everything that popped up. Fortunately, I was curious enough to always investigate this, and I remember distinctly that when I was in a law firm, the internet had just started to pop up. At that time, it was seen as a bit of a hobby because no-one really saw much money in it as it was such early days. Yet, I continued that path, and that helped me prepare for my first in-house role at Yahoo!, two years later. If I hadn’t had that curiosity, I probably wouldn’t have done that.

The advantage of being an in-house lawyer is that it allows you to act as the mediator between law and business and to translate complex legal issues into simple rules that work for the business and interpreting them. I’ve always liked that. I often say to my team that we’re a bit like interpreters; we need to explain complex laws in a way that the business can operate and draw the right conclusions. That’s a big advantage of being an in-house lawyer: being good at doing this and speaking the language of the business.

What are the most rewarding aspects of your role?

It’s the fact that there are so many different areas where things can be interesting and enable new things; areas where you can influence something or pioneer something. To look at current times, this is all around AI where there are so many areas developing fast. It’s exciting that you can be at the forefront of shaping new forms of agreements with customers, and how AI is being used within Adobe in a way that is responsible. A lot of teams look to the legal team for answers as to how we should approach AI in the best possible way for customers and for society. So, that is really where you get the most satisfaction as a lawyer where you can influence a bigger impact than just what you are working on at the moment.

What are the most challenging aspects of your role as an in-house lawyer?

When you feel like there’s something as a company you should not pursue; things you have to say no to. This can be very hard. When you know someone’s worked hard on something and preparing it, and you have to say no, but you have to put the biggest needs of the company first. Those are the tough scenarios that lead to the moments where you feel you are letting someone down, even though you know deep down it’s for the right reasons.

‘I often say to my team that we’re a bit like interpreters; we need to explain complex laws in a way that the business can operate and draw the right conclusions.’

How do you approach leadership and management, and how has your style adapted over time?

I try to provide my team members with a customised leadership style. I’m not a big believer in just using one-style-fits-all, but really trying to give everyone what they feel they need the most. In some instances, this is more coaching; in others, maybe more about challenging someone and giving them goals to drive them to the next level. Sometimes, it can also be about being a mentor, listening, and helping people express what they are aiming for and finding ways to help them.

What qualities are essential for excelling as an in-house lawyer in the technology sector?

It’s important for an in-house lawyer to really speak the language of the business and to understand what really drives the business, but also what drives the clients that we are consulting and what’s really on their minds to be able to help them in the day-to-day work. Also, I think to help shape questions in the business context. It’s easy to be a lawyer out of context and be very theoretical, but I think it’s really that ability to be very practical and show solutions that are helping the business to get to the point it would like to get to by not just saying no to what does not work but showing alternatives of what might work. I think that is key. On the tech side you need to understand technology, at least theoretically; you need to understand what is going on in order to see complexities and to really help to navigate through them, both for the business and for potential customers.

Who has been your greatest inspiration?

There are too many to list! It’s good to look at who’s around you and who’s doing well; often, these are managers and business leaders that you’ve seen. Outside of the profession, I really do like people who can take the edge out of situations and find a way forward and compromise that feels like no-one is winning but no-one is losing, one that brings everyone forward. An example for me is Nelson Mandela, to live through adversity but not taking those negative experiences and becoming aggressive or looking for revenge; the ability to master that and balance that to inspire people is something I am really impressed by.

What do you consider to be your most significant professional accomplishment?

The main thing for me is to look at my team, a happy team that works well together. This is a great achievement. It took a lot of different building blocks to get to that point. Also, I have been with Adobe for 20 years, and there have been several moments in the company’s history that I have been part of that really feel like great achievements. For example, our successful switch from the old model to the Cloud, and now with AI, and how we have worked with this for the past five to ten years to now be able to launch great products. That’s great because it’s a lot of individual work that goes into it upfront, and when it all comes together into a product that’s being received well by the market too, like Firefly, these are the best moments.

How do you envision the legal industry, particularly in the technology sector, transforming in the coming years?

I am expecting an even higher speed in terms of developments. We always think that we are already at a time of high speed with new AI trends, for example, but I expect that we will require even faster adjustments. It will require us in the in-house tech community to be agile and able to react to change. The emphasis will be on not just advising the business on how to do AI but, particularly important, the impact of AI and considering ethical AI. While 99% of users probably use AI in a good way, there will always be some that use it in a way that wasn’t intended, and so it’s key to work on that to help customers and users understand and distinguish. Deepfakes, for example, are something that can come up with the use of our products, so we are working really hard on the content authenticity initiative to balance that and make sure our users have the ability to see what’s been created by AI and to be mindful of deepfakes that are used to manipulate people and lead them in the wrong direction.

‘You can’t completely plan your career, but if you get opportunities to learn something new and explore new areas, everything you learn in these new fields comes in handy at some stage.’

Is there anything you would have done differently in your career, and what advice would you offer to lawyers aspiring to transition in-house within the technology field?
I don’t really like talking about regrets. I believe that a lot of things that perhaps went wrong in the moment have benefited me, either by learning how not to do things or learning that in certain circumstances you have to take certain measures, so there’s a good balance in that. It’s always important to want to learn; this is something that I have always tried to do. There have always been times in my nearly 30 years in the profession where I’ve taken on something new, and that’s the best way to learn a lot. Recently at Adobe I took on a business role for a year and a half on top of my normal role, and I learnt a lot from that and had to prove to myself that I could do it. So, I’d encourage everyone to step out of their comfort zones to try doing something different, be it in a different culture, a different country, or something beyond their normal scope because it brings positive learning and energy that helps you with your next steps.

What advice do you have for younger lawyers or individuals just starting their careers?

I often say this to younger lawyers seeking my advice: I like to tell them that everything helps. I’m a big fan of believing that certain things you can’t easily predict, you can’t completely plan your career, but if you get opportunities to learn something new and explore new areas – artificial intelligence now is a good example of that – everything you learn in these new fields comes in handy at some stage. I even go as far back as some of my jobs in my university or school time that I did on the side; they all came in handy in some shape or form.

What are your hobbies and interests outside of work?

I love playing golf. I play badly, but it doesn’t really matter to me because I play to really switch off, and golf helps with that. I also like cinema and TV, although often I find myself watching shows with lawyers in them. I also like reading, when possible. I really like the John Grisham books – I’ve almost read all of them. I work a lot on reading a lot around issues that keep me busy on the business side, which is always nice when you see some of the work you’re doing as more of a hobby.

anna.huntley@legalease.co.uk

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Tech and AI are at the top of everyone’s agenda right now. Legal Business and Thomson Reuters canvassed the opinions of UK GCs and heads of legal on everything from securing budget, to the tech they want and need to invest in and how to best approach CLM implementation.

Find out how your team compares in our brand new GC Legal Tech Pulse 2024 insight report. You can download the report for free here.

The post GC Legal Tech Pulse 2024 – in association with Thomson Reuters appeared first on Legal Business.

‘I’m an extrovert and I like to get out there. An in-house role is much more team orientated than private practice,’ notes Nigel Paterson, the general counsel (GC) of British electricals retailer Currys, on his decision to go in-house some 25 years ago.

And it soon becomes apparent that, so illustrious has been his career, somehow none of the gravitas is lost through Paterson drinking from his daughter’s Little Miss Naughty mug throughout the interview with LB.

Having studied Classics at the University of Oxford, Paterson soon decided that a career in academia surrounded by books was not for him. However, being a man of letters helped to steer him towards a legal career. ‘I’ve always loved language and how it is used, and law is fundamentally about crafting things and communicating,’ he explains.

Paterson notes that his father studied law and his godfather, Sir Peter Gibson, is a former barrister and Court of Appeal judge. He quips: ‘I was surrounded by lawyers!’

He adds: ‘Growing up, I admired my godfather for his searing intellect and his ability to distil the most complicated problems into the simplest of words,’ citing him as an inspiration.

After completing his legal qualification, Paterson secured a role as an intern at the European Commission (EC). For six months, he was a trainee in the legal team of Directorate General VI, supervising the agricultural market in the EU. ‘I speak fairly good French and I love being at the centre of political decision making. There were some very talented people in the Commission, and I loved it there,’ he reflects.

However, Paterson’s ambitions of a permanent job at the EC did not come to fruition, and he returned to London to start a training contract at Linklaters, where he qualified into the corporate team.

It was a bit of a step-change from his internship. ‘When I got to Linklaters, I knew I wasn’t going to get two hours for lunch like at the EC. But I thought I’d get an interesting insight because, at the time, I wanted to be a competition lawyer. But I’d soon forgotten that. When you’re in a corporate finance role at a Magic Circle firm, you don’t have time to think about what you’ve left behind or what you could be doing – you’re focused on the present, which takes up everything.’

Spending almost five years at Linklaters, Paterson recalls that his most embarrassing career moment happened when he was a trainee. One night at around 2 o’clock in the morning, 25 directors of major international banks had flown in to sign documents for the refinancing of Eurotunnel. Assigned the simple task of printing off the name of the attendees, in a panic, Paterson inserted the only piece of letter headed paper in the office wrongly into the printer. Desperate to fix the blunder, he rushed across the City to get a new piece of paper. When he returned, however, he faced a slow hand clap started by one impatient banker, annoyed at waiting around for 45 minutes in the wee small hours.

‘Blame culture is unhealthy because it leads to people not being open about things that they need to tell you about.’

Labelling the experience ‘horrendously embarrassing’, Paterson recalls: ‘I had the partner in charge just glaring at me and wondering where the hell I’d been. It was awful. When you’re a trainee, you just fear the worst and think: “That’s my career going up in smoke!”’

However, Paterson concedes that the gaffe informed his own leadership style. ‘Blame culture is unhealthy because it leads to people not being open about things that they need to tell you about. Management style now has to be about engaging with what the company wants, but also engaging with the team about what they want to derive from their work.’

He adds: ‘I don’t want to micromanage people. I don’t even have an office – I’m in the middle of an open plan because it’s important to be available and not hide. I don’t want to have that situation where junior lawyers are terrified of walking into a partner’s room. I want to push people to give their best, while also being supportive and empathetic.’

Leaving Linklaters, Paterson took a job as legal counsel at international oil and gas company ExxonMobil International, but has no regrets about his time in the Magic Circle: ‘I really enjoyed being at Linklaters, I worked with fantastic, talented people and I always wanted to work on big international deals.’

Paterson is candid that his time at ExxonMobil, spanning less than two-and-a-half years, wasn’t really for him. ‘It’s important to be joining an organisation where you’re aligned with the culture and values. I learned a lot from those two years, but it was a misstep in the sense that I don’t think I was ever going to feel at home in that sort of corporate culture and in that industry.’

After ExxonMobil, Paterson says that he was drawn to getting back into M&A work. One of his former colleagues from Linklaters, who moved to BT, told him there was no shortage of M&A deals at the telecoms giant. ‘I was sold on that prospect,’ he says.

On joining BT, Paterson recalls working on one of his most memorable cases. At six years qualified, he played a key role in advising on the demerger of O2. In 2001, BT announced the spin-off of the BT Wireless business, establishing a newly listed holding company, mmO2 plc, which operated under the O2 brand. He reflects: ‘This was my first big break in the law.’

Handling the £8bn demerger of O2, Paterson helped to coordinate 14 trading agreements while working alongside a team from Freshfields. ‘This was the first time I had led a big corporate transaction as a client. It was 12 months of extremely hard work, but it enabled me to get my hands on the whole of the business.’

Going to BT proved to be a pivotal move, with Paterson staying for 15 years in roles including senior counsel, chief counsel and GC. In his most recent position overseeing the legal, governance, and compliance team supporting BT’s consumer business, he played a lead role in the successful launch of the sports channel, BT Sports, in 2013.

As part of this, BT won the Premier League rights through an auction process, leading him through the excitement of finding TV studios, recruiting presenters, and hiring sports rights lawyers – essentially building the business from scratch. A keen football fan (Arsenal), Paterson says: ‘This was almost like the dream role! It was both subject matter interest and the very rare chance to start something from scratch. I very much enjoyed that.’

In 2015, though, Paterson received a call about a position at Dixons Carphone, following the merger of Dixons and Carphone Warehouse in 2014, before its rebranding as Currys in 2021. ‘This was an opportunity to create one team out of two very distinct businesses and two very distinct operational cultures,’ he remarks.

However, bidding farewell to a 15-year career at one company was not without a sense of trepidation. ‘A large part of the Dixons interview was centred on whether I could operate in a completely different organisation culture,’ he says. ‘BT has a strong organisational culture, quite bureaucratic, whereas a retailer is much more entrepreneurial and fast moving.’

Paterson decided his skillset would transfer. ‘I’d been doing consumer work with BT anyway, so I understood the challenges and opportunities when dealing with consumers. I was prepared for that.’

‘I don’t often think about the alternative to being a lawyer. But if I were, it’d be a radical alternative, deriving a different sort of pleasure.’

Now, with nearly nine years under his belt at Currys, Paterson is group GC and company secretary. His day-to-day involves managing 54 staff across six teams: legal, internal audit and risk, business standards, financial services compliance, company secretariat, and fraud and loss prevention. He also has dotted line accountability for legal teams in the Nordics and Greece.

Reflecting on the qualities of a good in-house lawyer, Paterson says: ‘It’s about having a solutions mindset. A good in-house lawyer looks at all of the potential barriers/issues and finds a way through. You also need to have an interest in the business to be able to drive it forward. The final thing is an ability to communicate complex things in simple ways so people can make decisions.’

In his legal career, he credits the now-retired Philip Bramwell, the former chief counsel (M&A) at BT and his former manager. ‘He was a tremendously driven professional, but he had real humanity and the ability not to take himself too seriously. He was an immensely supportive leader – he allowed us the freedom to get on with what we needed to do without suffocating us.’

Beyond the law, Paterson enjoys outdoor pursuits, often starting off his weekends by waking up at eight o’clock in the morning for a game of tennis. He draws inspiration from tennis player Roger Federer: ‘It’s athleticism and art combined,’ he says.

Paterson expresses equal enthusiasm for Joe Simpson’s 1998 book Touching the Void which has since been adapted into a film. He explains that this true story captures the harrowing tale of two climbers tackling the west face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes in 1985, facing terrifying conditions and ultimately becoming a powerful story of survival. ‘It’s not really about climbing. You don’t have to love mountains. It’s about the ability to survive in really dire circumstances.’

Inspired by this story, Paterson adds that if he hadn’t become a lawyer, he might have considered becoming a mountain guide. ‘I would say I don’t often think about the alternative. But if I were, it’d be a radical alternative, deriving a different sort of pleasure,’ mentioning that he has been known to partake in walking expeditions in the Alps, the Pyrenees, and Scandinavia.

Paterson’s other hobbies include watching football, holding a season ticket at the Arsenal stadium, and attending gigs, ‘If I’m not too old!,’ he quips.

On work-life balance, Paterson notes his ability to be fully immersed in work or completely detached. ‘I know how to be fully on or fully off. Having my wife and kids to fall back on is what gets me through as it provides a sense of balance and perspective. There’s a lot of stresses and strains with being a GC, but it’s important to get out, not be obsessed, and realise there’s a life beyond the law.’

He reluctantly admits that his guilty pleasure is singing Kate Bush in the shower. ‘If you knew what a bad singing voice I have, this is something I should keep under wraps!’ LB

elisha.juttla@legalease.co.uk

The post The Client Profile: Nigel Paterson, Currys appeared first on Legal Business.

David Halliwell, Pinsent Masons Vario: The world is now seen through a ‘VUCA’ lens – it’s Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. Are the risks that businesses are facing much more uncertain? What does that mean for how you are working in your roles?

John Ventress, Lombard Odier Investment Managers: As in-house lawyers, we need to be aware of the risks faced by our business, but our role is to support the business in navigating the future and helping it to develop, rather than being risk managers.

Gillian Duffy, Aldermore Bank: If you have come from organisations that have been severely distressed, you come well-prepared into a maelstrom like this, where everything needs to be operated in a more effective version than previously.

A lot of my peers who are [general counsel] GCs have had lifelong careers in quite mature, stable organisations. They are not used to being creative on solutions and there is that resistance to looking at things differently. Lawyers are more valued in a crisis than in everyday normal, and a lot of general counsel have a chance to demonstrate their value to their organisations because everything has to be looked at in a different way.

David Halliwell: Are businesses more ready to ride out some of the bumps than they might have been?

Gillian Duffy: I see a very challenging financial and economic market where investor cash will go into more mature, stable businesses with interest rates so high. That cheap cashflow that was around in the last three or four years when everything went digital has come to a close.

Metro Bank struggled recently, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, Monzo had a bit of trouble and Revolut has been taken over by HSBC. As financing is getting more expensive, we either get creative about how we raise finance, or that venture capital, seed funding and private equity is going to collapse in the next 12 or 18 months.

Yasmin Mangalji, Advanced: Businesses are building the muscle for dealing with crisis and uncertainty. Investors are paying more attention to the benefits of embedding pragmatic risk management frameworks. That might not have been top of the board agenda a few years ago, but the learnings from some of these scenarios have driven investors to start thinking a little differently.

As GCs we are not just risk mitigators and crises managers, we are enablers of the strategic objectives of the business.

David Halliwell: Do you think some of those risk management approaches are now being seen as driving shareholder value?

Yasmin Mangalji: Yes, absolutely. Part of the challenge is to present those quite boring-sounding risk management initiatives as a route to shareholder value, high growth or whatever it is that that business is focused on. Because we are experiencing these bumps in the road, there is more willingness to hear about those initiatives.

Gillian Duffy: You can only flag things to clients. There are going to be stages of the market where there is so much exuberance and competition, that everyone is thinking that they are going to lose out on the next great deal. Many of the people who are investing; their performance, remuneration and prestige within the organisation is built on the deals they close and getting their names in the papers. It is very difficult in those circumstances.

David Halliwell: Do you think those flags are being given more attention now than they might have been ten or 15 years ago?

Gillian Duffy: What helps in financial services is having the power on the governance side of the business. If you are the company secretary, you are managing the directors and the board, and you can make them cognisant of their responsibilities under corporate law. If you have a well-educated board of directors, they are not going to take the fall for a huge issue where they are going to get a corporate sanction, or lose their directorships.

If you are just general counsel rather than corporate secretary, then you probably do not have a great deal of influence. If you are not on the remuneration and the nomination committees, you do not have that policy influence on who in the organisation is coming in to balance the views on the risks and the takes on that. When there are evident practical risks in the market, then people are a bit more open to listening to your concerns.

Lucia Guijarro, Honeywell: I agree that companies are more appreciative of the work we do. Even larger organisations like Honeywell can be caught off guard in extreme situations such as Russia and Ukraine. No-one was prepared for the geopolitical conflict. Some companies had some experience winding down operations in Iran, but that was like nothing compared to Russia in terms of magnitude. As a result, we now have a more robust organisation.

We rely a lot on external counsel because everything we do from an oil and gas perspective and in other business sectors is impacted by sanctions. We have gained a lot of credibility as in-house lawyers, and I see that in the fact that legal teams are more robust. We used to have lots of contract managers and representatives, but now we also have many assistant general counsel and general counsel. We are getting recognition.

David Halliwell: Do you think that the gap between private and in-house practice in terms of the ability to assess and advise on risk is getting bigger?

Stephen Jurgenson, Savannah Energy: Yes, although our business is a bit unusual as it was founded in 2014 and the legal team is growing. We need lawyers with not only private practice expertise but also commercial understanding, especially in the markets in which we operate. We are focused on Africa and bumps in the road are all in a day’s work and we need lawyers who can navigate those.

David Halliwell: How did private practice prepare you for that?

Stephen Jurgenson: We have a deal-intensive environment at Savannah which suits my private practice background. My role of GC is not just about risk management, but it is also about delivery and sometimes leadership and mentoring. When the unexpected happens senior lawyers have to be a calming influence for the rest of the business.

Yasmin Mangalji: The key is always enablement. It is always saying, ‘Yes, there is a risk, but this is how we move forward.’

Stephen Jurgenson: There is a reward in risk, so you have to make sure you are paid for it. My role is often making sure we do not take risk for free.

David Halliwell: Now that you are operating in this environment, have your expectations of outside counsel changed?

Lawson Crawford, UCL Business: We need them to understand quite quickly what we as a business do. When I have meetings with my counterparts, they too share the view that there is a need for external counsel to see themselves as advisers who understand significantly what the business is, what we do, how we do things and what the risk points are.

It is a multiway process. There are some external counsel who yearn to understand how we as a business operate and what our risk pinch points are. We would like them to understand and advise from primarily a legal, but also from a commercial, risk perspective, what our legitimate concerns are. Yes, GCs can assist with facilitating this understanding.

Peter O’Keeffe, Dr. Martens: I agree with Lawson. I would also add that in my experience the better private practice lawyers understand what your particular business or industry drivers are and generally what c-suite stakeholders’ concerns and expectations are of you. This makes a significant difference in speed and quality of their advice. And if I am coming to them, I probably need both.

David Halliwell: Do you often have lawyers from private practice come to you and say, ‘I do not know enough about your business. Can you tell me all about it?’

Krishna Raman, Schroders Personal Wealth: I do not think they will say, ‘I do not know anything about your business’, but they will ask open questions and they will try and get to know the business better. Lawyers cannot assess risks for organisations unless they understand the organisation and the market in which they operate, but they need to know what our pinch points are, and they will only do that by spending time with us.

David Foley, Centrica: With an external lawyer, I expect them to know the law. I do not expect them to know everything about the ins and out of how the business works, otherwise they would be working for us. They can invest time, but the reality is they are never going to know the business as well as the in-house counsel. That is what the role of the GC is – to help them.

Lawson Crawford: I do not expect them to understand every intricacy of the business, but I do not like them to give advice in a vacuum.

David Halliwell: What are the situations where you would use external counsel?

John Ventress: I use external counsel in limited situations when the subject matter is well outside of the mainstream asset management or corporate comfort zone – an electric car scheme contract for example. I expect me and my team to be as competent and knowledgeable as external counsel within the asset management world. If we were not, I think there would be a problem.

Lucia Guijarro: I rely on external counsel when I am not familiar with the matter or the jurisdiction and when I need validation.

In-house lawyers are not only knowledgeable of technical aspects of the business, we also know our policies, constraints, annual operating plan. We have all this information that external counsel does not have, so we sit in the middle.

‘The better private practice lawyers understand what your particular business drivers are. This makes a significant difference in speed and quality of their advice.’
Peter O’Keeffe, Dr. Martens

Peter O’Keeffe: I agree. There are also times when going external is not a question of jurisdiction, scope, or value of a particular issue. If I believe a certain issue may impact the reputation of the brand or standing of the company, I might go external.

David Halliwell: It used to be a choice between doing something in-house or sending it to a traditional law firm, but there are now many other players in the market. How are people making choices as to where to go?

Gillian Duffy: There has been a swing towards looking at outsourcing, especially in my area in investment banking, corporate banking and M&A, to these quasi-legal operations. If we are looking at a large-scale litigation issue or a big product overhaul issue and a reinterpretation of our products, I would rather get a London law firm in to manage that team. Then I will go to an alternative legal services provider that has a bunch of lower level lawyers. I can cost it that way rather than in the old format. We cannot justify having the whole London legal team anymore on some things.

David Foley: There are some organisations that need an outsource centre somewhere to churn the cookie cutter contract stuff. We do not have those. We went to a lot of effort a few years ago to simplify our procurement contracts so the majority do not come through legal.

We reviewed our precedents and trained procurement to do it themselves so the contracts that the central commercial team are seeing are only the high value ones.

John Ventress: I work on the basis of the legal team being a mini law firm within my own business where we apply the same high standards you have in private practice. It is not sustainable for an in-house team to apply a low grade approach.

Peter O’Keeffe: We try and do as much as possible in-house. But we are a lean team so need to move at pace. Where possible, we look to streamline the contracting process and for the low-value or low-risk work, do it quickly. The economics of giving this to an alternative legal service don’t work for us. Stepping back, the larger question is what the next evolution of a legal function looks like? What will businesses need and what does legal need to do to be able to provide high-quality support and advice to meet the business’ demand? I don’t think alternative legal services are a long-term part of this for us. I think the broader question most in-house leaders are asking ourselves is ‘do we wait for AI or invest in better tech or more people now?’ Ultimately generative AI is coming. And when it comes it will do average and above average work better than a lot of lawyers.

Lucia Guijarro: At Honeywell, we do not have a policy as such on how to use ChatGPT, but we have guidelines. We can use ChatGPT or other third-party generative AI products, but we cannot upload anything. We cannot provide information on the products or the customers.

Yasmin Mangalji: The board expects continuous cost savings – use of technology is helping us to deliver and ensure resilience and scalability. As a PE-backed business we are particularly conscious of the need to stay lean – so we’re grateful for any opportunities to increase productivity and efficiency. At the same time we’re conscious of the need to use GenAI tools responsibly.

Gillian Duffy: Things that are talked about a lot on the internet in terms of AI are not necessarily correct. The problem with the robots is they do not know how to assess things, never mind against market or environment.

Lucia Guijarro: The capabilities are there. I agree that future general counsel have to start from somewhere, but the reality is that shareholders will probably say, ‘Instead of hiring five entry-level lawyers, I can have these robots creating drafts.’

Peter O’Keeffe: Generation Alpha will not learn drafting in the traditional sense. They will learn prompts for AI. The skill will be knowing what prompts.

Gunter Eren, Konica Minolta: I don’t believe you can leave AI to create a legal document by itself at this time.

However, I have found that some AI chatbots are surprisingly good. That does not mean they are perfect, it simply means you need to edit the output to meet your requirements. I have found that a chatbot will sometimes raise a point I have not considered, and then I can evaluate whether to incorporate it into my memo or contract, as appropriate. I see these chatbots as a tool that can assist lawyers in their legal work.

Regarding how we train our juniors, I believe they should be using ChatGPT and other AI tools now, so when they prepare a draft memo or contract for your review, the quality of the draft should be much improved. They in turn will learn from your final edits to the text.

David Halliwell: Juniors learn by looking at great drafting, which has come from a great lawyer. If the technology is presenting them with great quality product, they will learn what great quality product looks like.

Gillian Duffy: If I farm out my knowledge and my experience on how I approach these agreements to a technology firm I am depriving my junior counsel of their training.

When I am mentoring trainees or junior counsel within my organisation, I am teaching them how to assess the risk in these clauses, limitations or indemnities. They understand the case law and then from a practical position. It is a major training disadvantage for general counsel if we give that over to the robots.

John Ventress: I have not been in private practice for 13 years, but I do not see that sense of paranoia that we had about putting in the long hours when I was a more junior lawyer.

I do not think they have that kind of ‘battle experience’ that we might have had by virtue of the sheer amount of long hours we put in. On the other hand, for society as a whole, not having that experience and instead getting home and having a life in your late 20s and your early 30s is priceless.

David Foley: How many good lawyers did we lose from that? From a diversity point of view, how did that whole way that we learnt drive, largely women, I suspect, out of the legal profession?

John Ventress: In giving the ability to have more flexibility in your working life it is probably beneficial to a broader sector of people, not just women, but generally people that want their own lives back.

‘The board expects continuous cost savings – use of technology is helping us to deliver and ensure resilience and scalability.’
Yasmin Mangalji, Advanced

David Halliwell: What is your perspective on whether some of the barriers to entry and advancement which existed in the past, are getting easier to overcome? Do you find that it is easier in-house than it might have been in private practice for people from various backgrounds to rise to the top?

Lucia Guijarro: I am Hispanic and I was in private practice for a very short period of time, working for Honeywell for eight years, and also worked at a development bank in the City of London. All these firms already had inclusion and diversity initiatives and programmes in place when I joined, which has made me feel more confident.

David Foley: I am not sure if there is an in-house/private practice divide on this. Some in-house companies are probably very good at it, and there are probably some private practice firms which are very good at it. I have also seen some awful performance by private practice where they are talking a game, but not delivering. I suspect there are some in-house teams that are the same.

David Halliwell: Are there things which private practice law firms could learn from other professionals that you engage with? Are there other professions that are doing this well where the lawyers are not doing it so well?

John Ventress: The accountants have a better steer on it because of the nature of their business. It is easier for non-lawyers to operate and break down barriers to entry because they are not restricted by the requirement to be UK qualified. As an accountant you can pretty much qualify in most jurisdictions and then go to any part of the world. It is more difficult for the legal community because we are more compartmentalised.

Yasmin Mangalji: The barriers to entry seem to be getting lower as some organisations implement changed hiring practices, and begin to understand the commercial benefits of diversity of thought within the workplace. I think it’s yet to be seen whether the barriers to success have changed, the majority of senior lawyers I work with, particularly external counsel, are still not a diverse group. LB

nathalie.tidman@legalease.co.uk

The post The in-house debate: Look to the future now appeared first on Legal Business.

Fresh off a train from Blackburn, suitcase in tow, Lida Khanverdi arrives at the interview shortly after closing a new deal for EG Group. Having moved in-house just three years ago, the former Shoosmiths real estate associate is quickly making a name for herself, winning Rising Star In-House Counsel of the Year at the 2023 Legal Business Awards, and helping EG Group through a period of transformative growth.

Despite her rapid ascent, her route in-house has had its fair share of challenges and uncertainties. Khanverdi is not the type to claim she possessed a burning desire to enter the legal profession from an early age. Instead, her decision to study law came about after her family’s plans to emigrate to Canada fell through at the last moment, leaving her with only three weeks to make her university applications in the UK. Flummoxed on what subject to pick, her dad delivered the classic line: ‘Well, why don’t you do law? You can do anything with law.’

So, she embarked on a law degree at Lancaster University. However, as graduation drew nearer, she remained unconvinced by the prospect of pursing a legal career. A careers adviser suggested she widen her net and apply for some graduate schemes, but Khanverdi admits that she lacked the confidence to try something she did not have experience in, choosing instead to apply for the LPC.

Khanverdi landed a paralegal role, then a training contract, at DAC Beachcroft. As her training contract came to an end, doubt once again reared its head and she decided to move to an NQ job at Shoosmiths. Although, awkwardly, the two firms shared an office. ‘Shoosmiths was actually just across the corridor in the building that we were in. It was strange because I finished my training contract, went on holiday for two weeks then came back, and used exactly the same lift but took a different turn down the hall.’

At Shoosmiths she found a home in the real estate practice: ‘I really loved the team, and watched it grow from 15 people to 60-70 when I left. I got to the beating heart of a few of my clients and I really enjoyed working in the retail and leisure sectors. The people I worked with were vibrant and cool.’

Her move in-house came about unexpectedly. ‘During Covid, one of my clients called me just as I was about to have a cooked breakfast. We had nothing urgent on, so I wondered why my client was calling, and then started worrying that something urgent had come up, so I decided to pick up.’

‘An in-house job was what I’d been searching for because it has the leadership and management side to it. There’s that ability to make an impact on people’s lives as well as doing the thing that I had qualified in.’

Her fears were misplaced. The client was in fact calling to ask if he could put her forward for an in-house role at EG Group as he thought she would be a great fit.

‘I found that an in-house job was what I’d been searching for because it has the leadership and management side to it. There’s that ability to make an impact on people’s lives as well as doing the thing that I had studied for and qualified in, so there’s a nice balance.’

This approach is core to Khanverdi’s ethos. ‘My leadership style is very much people-centred and heart-led. I come from an honest basis because I’ve always found that, while sometimes the truth might be hard for people to hear, it’s necessary to maintain the trust between your team members and yourself. If I feel like I can 100% trust someone, then I’m more engaged and more motivated.’

Her biggest inspiration is Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston, whose research specialism focuses on the link between vulnerability and leadership. ‘She’s really influenced how I harness my own emotional intelligence and turn it into a skill to be used for leadership,’ Khanverdi says.

Open and reflective, Khanverdi is as keen to discuss areas she needs to improve as she is her successes. Asked how her team would describe her, she says: ‘I’ve got people in the team that would say wonderful things about me, but one of the things that came out of my 360 feedback, is that when under stress conditions, I need to take a step back before taking action.’

Khanverdi works part time. ‘I feel very strongly about work life balance. I’m not a mother but when I took on this job, I knew I wanted to work part time,’ she explains. This decision came following the pandemic as she had gone down to 80% hours and was working a four-day week. ‘I loved the balance,’ she says. ‘Now I do nine days out of ten and I’m very strict with my day off. I think it’s kind of unusual for somebody who is not a carer of some description to work part time,’ she adds.

She cites winning the Rising Star In-House Counsel of the Year award as her biggest achievement to date. ‘I did not see it coming and I do struggle with imposter syndrome,’ she explains. ‘I was hugely surprised when I was nominated and then when I looked at the list of people that I was up against I thought that I hadn’t done anything spectacular.’ When she was later asked why she had won, she was unable to recall the reasons given on the voiceover as she took the stage, because she was ‘too busy thinking: What?!’

‘I’ve got my trophy on my desk at work, so when I’m having one of those moments of self-doubt, I can look at it and remember someone thought I was worthy of achieving that. I should remember I am actually enough as I am.’

On memorable matters, acting on deals with high street stalwarts spring to mind for Khanverdi. She cites the acquisition of Leon as a turning point: ‘It was the first time I had really been involved in all aspects of an M&A deal, having come from a property background.’ The recent Asda acquisition of part of the EG business also stands out. ‘It was very interesting, seeing how people within our business come together,’ she explains.

It had been expected that Asda would acquire the majority of the business, but this was not the case. Managing how the team dealt with this change was an informative experience. ‘It was a good example of seeing your role as in-house counsel as being more than just the legal side. It was about helping people when they get really emotional and are under so much pressure,’ she elaborates.

These soft skills are critical to success, Khanverdi asserts. ‘You need an ability to connect with people, and to be able to take a helicopter view, not getting so caught up in the detail that the advice you give is not communicated in a way that the receiver needs it.’

Khanverdi recommends following the principle set out in Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: ‘Seek first to understand, then to be understood.’ The temptation when coming from a high performing background is to assume that, as you know the law, you know the best route for the company. However, the best legal route is not always the best commercial route.

‘When you go into a meeting with your internal client, wait, listen fully, then work with them to find a solution together,’ she advises.

‘I’ve got my trophy on my desk at work, so when I’m having one of those moments of self-doubt, I can look at it. I should remember I am actually enough as I am.’

A sense of humour is also important. Khanverdi recounts a recent call during a deal with KFC. ‘One of the external lawyers said, “I think it’s a little bit of a chicken and egg situation”. To which I burst out laughing. Thankfully I was on mute!

‘I literally could not control myself, to the point I had to switch my camera off. I received a WhatsApp message from my GC saying, “come on, share the joke.”’

As with private practice, the rapid development of AI is an ongoing concern for in-house lawyers. Khanverdi sees it as both an opportunity and a challenge: ‘We need to be open to new technology and AI, not fearing it but not just jumping in feet first without really understanding what it is that you want to get from it.’

In many ways she believes it will sit well with the expertise in-house lawyers have to offer. ‘I don’t think it means that lawyers are going to be out of a job, but I think lawyers will have to work harder to dig into different skillsets, which can’t be replaced, like emotional intelligence, and building connections with other departments. AI can’t do that for you. A lot of the skills which make a good in-house lawyer are not something that can be replicated by AI,’ she says.

Another evolution the industry faces is the wave of Gen Z lawyers joining the ranks. ‘We need to see more up-management, harnessing the skills of the generations that are coming after us,’ she says.

‘There’s a little bit too much judgement of the younger generation, because people think they work in a different way. Actually, we can all work very harmoniously together, but we have to understand each other.’

Outside of work, Khanverdi is a keen dancer. ‘I’m obsessed right now with salsa and bachata to the point that by Thursday this week, I’ll have done it five days in a row.’ A day trip to London proves no obstacle to her streak. ‘I’ve been researching places I can go in London, so I’m going somewhere tonight to do some classes and then go dancing!’

Other hobbies include trail running and a recent return to art. ‘I have started to try and get into the more creative parts of my life. So, I’ve picked up where I left off from at school and I’ve started drawing and painting again.’

She is also a keen traveller. ‘I recently did a solo backpacking trip to Montenegro, Albania, and Croatia.’ Extolling the virtues of her time abroad, she adds: ‘It was brilliant. I went with zero plans and no return flight. It was exhilarating, just a reminder to myself that I don’t need to be in control all the time for things to work out.’

When asked for book recommendations, she suggests Confessions of a Forty-Something F**k Up by Alexandra Potter. ‘It is really funny – also given where I am in my life very relatable, so I’m enjoying that.’

She concludes: ‘My music taste is very indie and classic rock focused, so for me Taylor Swift is a guilty pleasure. When I’m not doing sporty stuff, you’ll find me listening to live music.’

holly.mckechnie@legalease.co.uk

The post The Client Profile: Lida Khanverdi, EG Group appeared first on Legal Business.

Nathalie Tidman, Legal Business: Welcome everyone. We have a fantastic panel of extremely talented and insightful people here this evening.

As a starter for ten, what do you see as the real opportunities and benefits for in-house lawyers using generative AI in your day-to-day dealings?

Helen Dooley, AIB: In-house lawyers add value to the business, but we are an overhead. I am scared by GenAI, but I see it as a huge opportunity for in-house lawyers. I am sure law firms can utilise this for the low-value, high-volume type work to free up lawyers, who tend to be expensive resources, to do the strategic value-add. It is about harnessing the opportunity.

David Hackett, Addleshaw Goddard Ireland: We are only at the beginning of this.

‘GenAI is a broad piece. It is drilling in and finding the piece that is useful for you. It is absolutely strategic and useful on all levels.’
Cíara Garahy, Salesforce

The most logical use of generative AI is around those quasi-legal tasks that land on our desks and take up a lot of time. We can see that the technology can be really revolutionary for that, and the hope would be that we can deploy the technology successfully, that it will free up lawyers’ time from some of those tasks. We can let the AI do that, and do it well, so we can really concentrate on the type of advice that we are trained to give and becoming more involved in analysing the results that come through the AI tools, and inputting on strategic matters that really add value to the business.

Cíara Garahy, Salesforce: If you even look at a small use case, if you are trying to hire someone into your team and the HR person says, ‘Can you write a job description?’ ChatGPT can write that. There is a huge range of opportunity, not only on the legal aspect, but especially for in-house counsel. A portion of our job is contracts, but a larger portion is actually dealing with the business, writing communications, marketing and talking to people. AI is a huge opportunity within that and in driving efficiencies. For the things that come across your desk that are not actual strategic legal work, it is game-changing.

Nathalie Tidman: Is GenAI just a way of saving time and being more efficient, or are you seeing this as a real tool for actually making strategic decisions?

Cíara Garahy: It depends on which tool you are using and how you are using it. Are you using it for an NDA review that you had an intern doing? Are you using it to analyse a huge set of data that came in and you need to get a response for your board in time? GenAI is a broad piece. It is drilling in and finding the piece that is useful for you. It is absolutely strategic and useful on all levels.

Helen Dooley: AIB has done a few acquisitions in the past couple of years. We have bought a couple of companies, and we have bought some loan books to use it, for example, to accelerate your due diligence. Months can be spent on due diligence, and all the while, you are spending money, but you are using valuable resources, whether it is business analysts and internal and external lawyers, to get a quicker answer on something like, ‘Is this feasible? Are there any problems there? Is this a company that is going to fit with our strategy?’ To short-circuit all that brings huge business benefits.

David Hackett: To get the best use out of AI now and in the future, you are really going to get benefits if you stand back a little bit, look at your business, your role, the industry you are in, the type of tasks that you do, and really figure out what the use cases are. The possibilities are endless, so we should not be constrained by just saying we are going to use it for what occurs to us now.

Time spent strategically thinking about how we are going to deploy AI in our businesses is really going to be valuable, and it is going to be time well spent.

Nathalie Tidman: Have there been any ‘wow’ moments where you have thought AI is really driving change in quite a short space of time? Any experiences of actually having really good results from using it?

Cíara Garahy: Salesforce uses GenAI products, but they are not the big game-changer for us. The big game-changer is that Salesforce sells GenAI products. Einstein GPT is the big play at the moment. We are looking at it from the other side of the house as well, and the customer’s concerns. When you see how it can change our customers’ day-to-day and you actually see what can be done with the GenAI product that we are selling, then you are like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is huge’.

If you take something like an online retailer, they can apply it everywhere, from them buying the fabric to the person at the end of the purchase. For example, if you buy a knit jumper every winter, they know you are buying a knit jumper, but now, not only do they know that, but they can also create a marketing piece around it. They can provide you with a sales piece. That is all fed through your product suite that you are already using. That is when you go, ‘Wow, look at it go’.

Helen Dooley: Working for a regulated financial service means that we are some way off. Banks, and certainly Irish banks, in the context of the Irish regulatory framework, are going to be slow to get ahead here. We use a lot of AI today. For example, we would have automated credit decisioning, but that is just based on, ‘If these facts are true, then the person can be approved for a personal loan up to £10,000’.

We looked at some research, which I think was in China. China obviously has a huge population, and for many years, it has been sharing its data. It did an analysis of recovery of loans going bad. If somebody took out a loan and they had the equivalent in China of a Hotmail account, rather than a more established email account, and a mobile phone that was pay-as-you-go, they had a higher default rate. That was proven time and time again with many datasets.

The Irish banks are particularly hampered with holding more capital because of our history through the financial crisis. Can machine learning help us with our lending decisions? We also have to think about the ethics of that. Are people being excluded from basic credit? If the machine has identified that the loan will go bad, it does not necessarily mean they should not get the loan in the first place. There are interesting concepts to consider.

David Hackett: In terms of ‘wow’ moments, it is just seeing the practical application of how the technology can work and the ability to use plain English with the technology to get it to analyse data and documents with an accurate result. The narrower AI tools have been successful, and there is still a place for those. I am thinking of something like Kira, which is used a lot in litigation, and Discovery. Again, the way things needed to be phrased, and the inputs that were needed to drag out the information, it needs to be quite specific.

This is completely different. You can almost talk to it in regular, plain English, ask it a question. It might clarify what you are seeking to look for, but then it goes off and it delivers the results. Something I think we are all going to have to get over is the ability to trust the AI and rely on what it is doing.

‘Can machine learning help us with our lending decisions? We also have to think about the ethics of that. Are people being excluded from basic credit?’
Helen Dooley, AIB

Nathalie Tidman: There are clearly risks associated with GenAI, such as data privacy. What do you think are the most salient points around the challenges of using it?

Cíara Garahy: There are a few massive challenges. One is obviously the data piece and, going back to the techie side of it, that applies whether you are doing open source or closed source. If you are using open source and feeding data into it that is coming out on the far side, whose data is being used? How is that safely being protected? Who is the processor? Who is the controller?

You also have to think of IP and who owns the output, and you have to back-to-back your agreement. For an in-house lawyer, realistically, none of us are at the point, unless we are working in open AI, of using a third-party process. You need to back-to-back your agreements because of your IP, your data and ethics. If you are in a regulated industry, can you trust what comes out of it?

AI is very good at predicting and using its dataset, but it is not very good at the nuances, so there are huge risks there and you have to look at them all individually for your own unique business and how it is being worked out.

David Hackett: It is difficult to go down into the weeds, but you need to look at the contractual basis that governs the use of whatever technology you are using, be it something that is open or a bespoke model that might be developed for you. What are the terms of use that you are permitted to use it under? It might restrict the scope of use. There can be restrictions that you need to be aware of in terms of how you use it. As lawyers, our primary job is that we give advice and people need to be able to rely on that and trust us, and that is absolutely sacrosanct.

When you are providing services to clients that effectively use AI technology as part of those services, are your clients aware of that? You need to be transparent so that they understand how it is going on. That may lead to more questions, but again, that is the contractual framework that you have in place, both in terms of your receipt of the technology but also in service delivery.

In terms of the in-house environment, it is going to be a huge pressure. The businesses will want to use these things and then, again, your role as in-house counsel is to say, ‘How do we deliver that for the business but protect the business in the best possible way?’ You are not going to be able to find a perfect solution to that. It is finding the best workable solution because the business will want to use these tools and will ask how you can allow that to happen.

Helen Dooley: In-house legal teams spend a lot of their time enabling the business but also keeping the business from walking into glass walls. I see a point coming very quickly where various business units will see the value these tools can deliver but then we are faced with the issues of if it is open software, we cannot put our clients’ data into it. Are the algorithms fair? Are there any biases in there? There is a huge learning for us here.

Again, as a regulated financial services entity, we will be very slow on the uptake, because the risks in the near term are going to outweigh the benefits, because we do not know enough.

Nathalie Tidman: Some of us – and I am including myself in this – are Luddites. Have you been in the position where somebody has resisted the use of technology like ChatGPT? What are the barriers to rolling it out across the business and making people buy into it?

‘This is a complete change in the entire business environment, so you do need to get on board with generative AI because I do not think that opting out is an available option.’
David Hackett, Addleshaw Goddard Ireland

David Hackett: What I would say to people is this is not an optional extra in your set of tools that you use as a lawyer. It is not something where somebody is coming along trying to sell you a piece of technology and you say, ‘Maybe I would use that’, or ‘That might be useful’, or ‘It might be a little bit of help in my job’. This is a complete change in the entire business environment, in the legal environment, in lots of different environments, so you do need to get on board with it because I do not think that opting out and saying, ‘I am not going to use this’ is an available option.

As much as possible, you need to embrace it, see what it can do and be open to that, because you see all these headlines, buzzwords and slogans going around. When that review came out that said 44% of legal jobs would be replaced by AI, that is a headline clickbait story, but it is not so much that AI is going to replace lawyers. Another line I heard used that I thought was quite accurate was that lawyers who use AI will replace lawyers that do not use AI.

Helen Dooley: AIB will not be at the forefront of this. When ChatGPT was getting traction, as a precaution AIB disabled the screenshot element on people’s work phones. I presume that was in case we took a screenshot of customer data and put it into ChatGPT. We are behind the curve.

Nathalie Tidman: If you had a junior member of the team using GenAI, you clearly could not take what they produced as read, or as being the finished article. Are there any risk mitigation processes that you are developing or using already in your businesses?

Cíara Garahy: I feel like you have to review everything. ChatGPT is probably quicker than a trainee but is it more accurate? You still have to review the work regardless. You would not send something out blindly and most people would not do that anyway, with the legal products that are for sale and for use. I was listening to a podcast and it said, ‘Do not be afraid that the robots are coming. If a robot is coming, close the door’. They have not been trained to open doors.

Nathalie Tidman: David, from your perspective, there is the client piece and not putting client data into GenAI to come up with a result. How do you manage that?

David Hackett: It is a moving target, and we are at the very beginning of this journey, so we are developing those policies and frameworks. There are some basic ones which say, be careful with what data you put in and make sure you have the relevant permissions and that you are entitled to do that. Approach with caution, but, that said, I am not saying it should be a runaway train, but you do not want to be overly restrictive. That may lead to some restrictions on what you use the technology for, and it may not be helpful, but they are common sense things like taking a step back and looking to see what you are using the AI for. If it is to draft an email to somebody, that is absolutely fine; it can do that and do it very well.

On the other hand, if it is litigation involving commercially sensitive or valuable data, then you do want to think, ‘Should we be feeding that into an AI technology?’ and specifically, ‘What is the agreement? How are we entitled to use it? Who gets access to this data once it goes in? What protections do we have in terms of contractual remedies?’

Helen Dooley: Operating in a regulated industry sometimes means we are slower to adopt new technology. For example, with having our data in the cloud it took us a long time to be comfortable with that. Part of the reason is half the people in this country have a bank account with us and we have your sensitive personal data, and we know what you spend your money on so there is a huge trust element.

We have sensitive personal data that would be catastrophic if in the wrong hands or used wrongly. Banks, certainly in Ireland, are still a long way off from having high trust levels, however, we need to accelerate our thinking around AI, because I see the benefits. If we go at the glacial pace that we might sometimes approach other new technologies or new innovations, we will be left behind.

Nathalie Tidman: One of the risks at the moment is that GenAI is not regulated, so is that a self-regulating thing that each business has to do itself? Do you think it should be regulated by an external body?

David Hackett: There are different types of regulation. Are we talking about legal regulation or general regulation of AI? On general regulation of AI, does it need to be regulated? Definitely. ChatGPT itself has said it would welcome regulation. ChatGPT may be trying to get ahead of the curve, and it is a good soundbite. Undoubtedly, this is going to be a massive area and, frankly, how do you regulate it? It is tricky. From a European perspective, we have the AI Act coming down the tracks and there has been great progress on that. There is talk of it being adopted by the end of the year; that is very ambitious. In terms of what it sets out and the type of issues it is trying to grapple with, it is going to be difficult to effectively regulate AI. I suspect you will always be chasing the genie a little bit and trying to get it back in the bottle.

Looking at the example of GDPR, we are five years in with that now and it was trumpeted as, ‘It is going to fix everything on data protection, making sure individuals’ rights are protected and that organisations are regulated’. There is no doubt it has achieved some of that, but it has not functioned in the way that people were expecting. Although data protection is a huge area, it is very small in comparison to regulation of AI. Regulation is needed, but there is a balance needed as well. If you are overly prescriptive on the regulatory side, it may stifle innovation.

There is a trust question here as well and for people to feel comfortable using it and that their data is being used by it, they are going to want to see a level of regulation and certainly, in the legal regulation sphere, additional controls and restrictions on lawyers using it. In essence, lawyers need to be able to do a stand over with whatever results are generated by AI. That is what we are paid to do, to give advice that clients and our businesses can rely on. That is fundamental. Whether that is set out in regulation or not, we need to be able to do it. As a regulation piece, it is going to be huge.

Nathalie Tidman: Are you already training people internally on how to use AI to mitigate risk?

Cíara Garahy: Absolutely. You have to. It is like any new piece of technology, you have to take it, look at it, adopt it, learn it and then everyone needs to learn a new piece of technology when it comes in.

First, the lawyers have to upskill. We can then put the guardrails in place and then push it out and also educate our customers, because they are trying to buy this piece of technology. It is a massive education piece for everyone.

David Hackett: At the moment it is about encouraging use in the correct environments and with the correct datasets. Using it is the biggest thing for people at the moment, because a surprising number of people have not used it yet, so you are talking about it in the abstract.

‘It is like any new piece of technology, you have to take it, look at it, adopt it, learn it and then everyone needs to learn a new piece of technology when it comes in.’ Cíara Garahy, Salesforce

Nathalie Tidman: What impact is GenAI going to have on the value for money question and on pricing?

Helen Dooley: Clients are going to expect to be paying for outputs, not time input. Aside from AI cutting through, the old billable hour for law firms is questionable today. As an aside, the alternative legal service providers, which are the Big Four accountancy firms that are going to embrace AI and not come at it from the traditional billable hour, are going to force the law firms to have a different approach.

David Hackett: The billable hour is a concept, it is there, but there are a lot of other factors that flow into what you charge for the work that you do. Certainly, my own experience is clients are not shy about raising the issue of fees. The majority of clients are fair, and they realise the firm needs to make a profit on that, but equally they do not want to be paying an exorbitant price, or paying for something that they feel is your learning and you are going to be able to use in the future. That is a reasonable conversation to have, and you need to be able to have it.

Some of these tools are very expensive and so there is going to be an investment by law firms in getting licences to deploy them throughout the organisation, but conversations around fees for a long time have been moving more and more in the direction of ‘What value are you delivering for us?’ Even if you are doing quite mundane tasks, that can be of value to a client, and they are very happy to pay for it. This is going to refocus the conversation on the value of the advice you provide. If it is the case that you are using AI to provide your advice more quickly, for example, in a competitive process where there are a number of bidders to buy a company and you can use AI to dig in and see where the issues in this company are and how that is going to affect the price we are going to pay, very quickly you get to a point of ‘This is what it is worth to the client. We are willing to offer this price to get the deal done’. If you can deliver that quickly, it is of huge value for the client.

Cíara Garahy: The other side of it is if we are in-house, we then also have to show our value. If we are getting the AI tools in, then what is the point in us being there? If I do ten NDAs a day as my day job and an AI tool can do it, then what is justifying my salary? Across the board we need to be careful about the value-add on this piece.

Nathalie Tidman: What are your takeaways on the future of GenAI?

Cíara Garahy: It is here, so get used to it. It is not as scary as you think it is and you are able to do it.

Helen Dooley: The more curious we are, the more benefit we are going to get from it. AI is in a lot of the things we do today, and so we are trying to harness the value it will ultimately bring.

David Hackett: Embrace it because it is happening. There is no getting away from it so better to be on the train than see the train pulling away from the station and you are not on it. Realise that this is a revolution and that this is a good time to be involved. We are not coming to it when everyone else is already way ahead and they know what they are doing.

Do not to be scared by it. AI is another tool that we as lawyers will use to do our job, but we direct what it does, we give it the data to analyse, we ask it the questions, it gives us results, we interpret that. Ultimately, we have the final say. LB

Photographer: Bryan Brophy

nathalie.tidman@legalease.co.uk

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It is fair to say that Colt Technology Services does not look out of place in its trendy environs of Shoreditch, East London. Decorated with the UK’s largest wall mural, which the company commissioned a collection of graffiti and street artists to create, the building comes complete with its own beehive, shortly to produce its first batch of honey. Colt’s deputy general counsel (GC) Alessandro Galtieri, ever the attentive host, proudly shows the artwork off when LB drop by for a chat.

As both his parents studied law, it was perhaps inevitable that Galtieri would pursue a legal career, despite initial attempts to resist: ‘I did try to escape!’ he quips, ‘I wanted to do something else – I was passionate about astrophysics.’

However, he eventually realised he did not quite have the natural aptitude for maths necessary for an astrophysics career. ‘Maths is a language. Starting a career knowing I was behind others who had a natural fluency in the language, and that I would always be behind, was something which at 18 I wasn’t ready to consider. Law instead was a very familiar language because I had absorbed it by osmosis at the dinner table,’ he observes.

This early interest in maths and science has nevertheless stood him in good stead throughout his time in the legal profession. ‘One constant thread throughout my career is that I’ve always worked in hi-tech environments. I’m genuinely interested, I like to learn and I’m not afraid of the hard sciences.

‘My running joke is that I speak engineer. I am not fazed by all the three letter acronyms which engineers love throwing around the table,’ he adds.

The other attraction of hi-tech spaces is the ‘constant change’. As Galtieri notes: ‘It is impossible to stand still. If I look at some of the things I’ve done a few years ago, the tech has moved, the commercial environment has moved which means the contracts move.’

This marked curiosity has seen Galtieri’s career span several countries, multiple industries and a rapidly evolving technological environment. Undertaking his training contract in Italy at Studio Legale Tonucci, he worked with partner Fabrizio Cugia di Sant’Orsola, a leader in the telecommunications sector. Telecoms regulations had just been liberalised and there was a frenzy to get into the Italian market, providing Galtieri with a dynamic landscape in which to cut his teeth.

He followed Cugia di Sant’Orsola in-house after he accepted a job as GC of a newly-created telecoms company, Grapes Communications. While there, Galtieri won a scholarship for young European lawyers run by the British Council, which led to a move to London to work in private practice at Shearman & Sterling.

Part of the scholarship scheme included a week in Belfast participating in a series of lectures and social events. One day, Galtieri popped into an internet café to check his emails. Greeted by an empty inbox, he decided on a whim to check an old account, having paid for another ten minutes of internet.

An invite to interview at the European Space Agency awaited him. He had applied for the job the previous year, but since then had switched email accounts, forgetting that he had used this address for the application. Shortly afterwards, he was offered a job, and his plans to stay in London were stymied by a move to the Netherlands.

However, that was not the only pivotal thing to happen to him that day. At a party in the evening, he met a young barrister, who would later become his wife. ‘It’s one of those sliding doors moments, where you think, if I had not checked that email, if I had not gone to that party,’ Galtieri reflects.

At the European Space Agency, he worked as a contracts officer, operating across a range of projects, including the James Webb Space Telescope. ‘Every time I see one of those pictures, I know the incredible technical feat that it has been to create it. I’m a little bit proud that I was part of that.’ His time there even gets ‘grudging approval’ from his two daughters, aged 12 and ten.

‘Working in the science department, every mission had a new objective in terms of what they wanted to discover,’ he says. ‘You had the scientists who had imagined the mission on the back of a napkin and then, in the same canteen, you would bump into an astronaut.’

He responds diplomatically when asked about what astronauts are like in person: ‘Some of them have a really good sense of humour, but the vast majority… They’re a bit like pilots. They can be very focused on what’s interesting to them and not necessarily anyone else.’

After the European Space Agency, Galtieri worked at Interoute Communications and Hexagon, before moving to Colt where he has been for the last 11 years. Having joined as an interim contract lawyer, he is now deputy GC.

‘You had the scientists who had imagined the mission on the back of a napkin and then, in the same canteen, you would bump into an astronaut.’

Colt announced on 2 November 2022 that it was buying the EMEA activities of the American company Lumen. In his current role, Galtieri is responsible for sorting out 18 regulatory approvals in 15 countries before the deal closes, a task he considers one of the most interesting, if challenging, projects he has undertaken in his career.

When considering his own management style, Galtieri explains: ‘There are different theories of leadership. I subscribe to one that is called the servant leader. My job is to help and empower and develop the team.’ He suspects this translates to his team finding him ‘open, long winded, and approachable’, and is quick to praise the in-house legal team at Colt: ‘I’m extremely lucky, I’ve got a bright, cohesive, hardworking team.’

The culture at Colt is something Galtieri is clearly passionate about. ‘This is a very respectful company. It respects everyone, it respects differences, it respects peoples’ contributions. I have a privileged position in that I can role model certain behaviours but also ensure other behaviours are prevented. If they do arise, they are dealt with. I take this very, very seriously.’ Colt has several DE&I initiatives, including a recent series where colleagues shared the impact of invisible disabilities on their working lives.

As with any legal career, it has not always been plain sailing. Asked to divulge a war story, Galtieri offers an example of an acquisition scenario in a previous job. After an all-night negotiation in Madrid, he and his boss returned to their hotel to find that their keycards did not work. An apologetic receptionist explained that as they had only booked for one night and, as it did not appear that they had used their rooms, the hotel team had checked them out. No other rooms were available, and the pair was left wandering the streets of Madrid in search of alternative accommodation.

After eventually finding another hotel, allowing them to shower and shave before heading back out to close the deal, the Spanish notary put a spanner in the works by questioning the signing powers of someone on the other side. Left scrabbling for a solution, the team had to fly a notary from the Netherlands Antilles to Madrid with a signed document. The notary handed the document over, then immediately turned on their heels to catch the next return flight. The deal was done, and the deadline met but, as Galtieri remarks: ‘It was the most expensive piece of notarial work that I’ve ever paid for!’

When it comes to external legal advisers ‘a very good understanding of the organisation’s commercial drivers’, is a must-have for Galtieri. He explains: ‘Colt has had a preferred law firm for more than ten years now. There is a whole generation of trainees and associates, some of whom are now partners, who have grown with the Colt account, and they know our business and our finance processes.’

The role models who have influenced Galtieri’s career include his old colleague Cugia di Sant’Orsola and his grandfather. He credits the former with being extremely commercial. ‘He could genuinely see around corners,’ Galtieri says, citing an instance where the partner asked him to draft a document for a client before it had even been requested. Lo and behold, the client asked for the document in the next meeting and they were able to produce it instantly.

His grandfather was a civil servant and copyright expert with ‘a brain the size of this meeting room’, Galtieri says. He represented Italy at several international conferences, and Galtieri describes him as a man ‘incredibly ahead of his time’. He has articles written by his grandfather, which are now over 50 years old, on a range of subjects. One, ‘A note on the protectability of computing software’ written in 1973, discusses copyright ideas a decade ahead of contemporary thinking on the subject.

Looking back on his career, the one thing Galtieri would change is the time he spent worrying about perfecting his technical skills. ‘One thing you learn with age is that businesses are run by people. If you understand people’s motivations, you will be a far more effective in-house adviser than someone who is technically perfect.’

Outside of the law, Galtieri loves to travel. He describes a recent family holiday to Morocco: ‘I was sitting on a dune watching the sunset. My daughters, on the other hand, were rolling down the side of the dune. Different ways of experiencing the same thing.’

He is also passionate about the theatre, recommending the ‘biting’ adaptation of an Accidental Death of an Anarchist at the Theatre Royal Haymarket and The Play That Goes Wrong. ‘If you want to have a laugh, it’s absolutely brilliant, seriously side-splitting. By the end of the two hours, you feel like you are wheezing!’ he says.

‘I love the Globe and the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. I must have seen eight or nine plays there. I think it’s the best space in London. It’s candlelit, and it gives it such an intensity.’

The methodical, detail-orientated approach, evident in Galtieri’s professional life, carries over to his reading habits. ‘My wife was mocking me on holiday because I was reading China: A History by John Keay.’ For him, the book’s draw was its comprehensive timeline. ‘Europeans are always keen on the last two hundred years but, if you want to understand China, you have to go back much further.’

He is equally enthused about Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life. ‘A mind-blowing book,’ he reviews. ‘There’s a whole network that connects all the trees in a forest. It was believed that this was only to pass nutrients, but it is actually to pass messages, allowing one species of tree to message another species of tree that there is, say, a disease in another part of the forest.’

Galtieri’s career has spanned several countries and, while you can take the man out of Italy, you cannot take the Italian out the man. At the end of the interview he admits his guilty pleasure. ‘Binge shopping food at a specialist Italian deli website where I basically spend a fortune on stuff I could get for a third of the price in Italy, but I can’t help myself!’

holly.mckechnie@legalease.co.uk

The post The Client Profile: Alessandro Galtieri, Colt Technology Services appeared first on Legal Business.

Nathalie Tidman, Legal Business: How much access do you have to the board? How intrinsic are you to the decision-making processes of your business?

Aurea Garrido, Warner Bros. Discovery News & Sports: My team sits with the business. For me, a decisive factor was being part of the executive committee, which I have been for three or four years now. I needed to be part of something; not just advising on technical legal issues. Not everyone is as lucky. I know lawyers who have more senior positions than me in the same industry who don’t get access to the exec team or the board.

Natasha Doulia, KPMG: In the UK, legal does attend board meetings, but in some places around EMEA it’s quite difficult. There’s a long way to go on that. When something bad happens they then realise that legal really does need to be involved and does need a seat at the table. Legal can help with revenue, but also help protect the firm so that it’s not paying out lots of money in litigation.

Lucia Guijarro, Honeywell: Honeywell is a very large corporation, and each business unit has its own legal department. We work together with the business and other functions – compliance, corporate, finance, treasury, etc. We always have a seat at the table at the business unit level and always try to find solutions. Once you make them your allies, it works very well.

Anushka Herath, HSBC Innovation Banking: You want to feel like the business thinks that you are as invested in the success of the company as they are. You can’t just stay in your lane and say, ‘this is the legal question, and I am going to answer it’. More often than not, you’re part of a broader conversation as to what should happen. It’s a much more rewarding role if you can achieve that.

Amelia Senior, Financial Times: Being intertwined with the business lets us give better legal advice. Being in those meetings and sparking their interest and asking them to explain to me how things work, I understand what they’re trying to do. I ask questions that I wouldn’t have asked had I not got that extra detail, which means I can be a better adviser.

Nathalie Tidman: What are the hot topics with ExCo and the board?

Natasha Doulia: Whether you can use ChatGPT is a big one for companies. How do you protect the business from using it as well, especially if you produce client deliverables? Data is a hot topic generally. We have so much data. What do we do with it? Is it something that we can use?

Joy Van Cooten, ACI Worldwide: My company has blocked ChatGPT on all laptops. It is a major concern; we are a software company and if someone accidentally uploaded our code to ChatGPT, that would be detrimental to the company. Once it’s out there, the genie is out of the bottle and impossible to put it back in again.

Natasha Doulia: The use of AI is constantly under review. We’re currently saying in some parts of the business you can use ChatGPT, but just for research purposes. You can’t put anything client-related into it and you can’t use it for a client service or deliverable in case it’s wrong or doctored in some way.

Matthew Kay, Pinsent Masons Vario: We have the challenge of not only trying to work out the impact of AI on the business of law, we must also advise on its impact for clients’ businesses. We must run fast enough, not only to get on top of it as a business, but to be able to advise on it.

Amelia Senior: There’s real discussion at the board at the moment about getting a policy in place around ChatGPT. We want to be able to use it because everyone is using it and it is incredible. If we can benefit from that in some way, that is brilliant. We need to use it within a defined remit, and the challenge at the moment is defining exactly what those parameters should be.

David Halliwell, Pinsent Masons Vario: I heard one GC say that their ambition was that ChatGPT would replace all legal work up to associate level.

Aurea Garrido: That is not going to happen.

Lucia Guijarro: For very basic research, yes. For decision-making? Definitely not.

‘It’s very much a concern that someone using ChatGPT or some other form
of AI could open a back door into our systems.’
Joy Van Cooten, ACI Worldwide

Terie Liu, Shiva Hotels: There are also other products. ChatGPT is the current model of AI, but in terms of other products and sharing of data, it’s been quite interesting to see how that is going to evolve. For us at Shiva, it’s more about customer information or client information. We deal with a lot of partnerships with other people. How do we share that information with others? Is that our information? Is that their information? Who has the responsibility if there’s a leak?

Joy Van Cooten: Cyber is definitely a big issue for us, because we deal with lots of personal data for fraud screening. We can have tens of thousands of attacks a day with people trying to get that information. It’s very much a concern of the company that someone using ChatGPT or some other form of AI could open a back door into our systems. At the moment, it’s very much shut down, and everyone is analysing how it can be used to the advantage of the company, while still protecting our customers’ data.

Nathalie Tidman: How much substance is there around ESG concerns in the business?

Lucia Guijarro: ESG is huge right now. It used to be a sub-function, and now there are general counsel for ESG. As part of our digital transformation directive, we developed an ESG app. Every single proposal including ESG claims when we are bidding for business has to be vetted to avoid misrepresentations. We have relied heavily on external counsel for certain aspects of ESG because there isn’t anyone with 20 years of experience in ESG matters. That person does not exist.

Natasha Doulia: It’s crazy the number of companies which have started to come to us to help them with their ESG reporting and strategy. They are now coming to us more due to the disclosures required by the impending CSRD legislation. The audit division is likely to add the assurance services about whether they are meeting ESG targets, and that’s just in Europe. Then similar legislation will probably come out in the US. Companies are not equipped to deal with it. They don’t have the data in terms of reporting. It is a huge opportunity for all of us to help the business and we as good corporate citizens, also as a client or a supplier, have to put ESG targets on ourselves and deliver against those targets.

David Halliwell: We have heard of some general counsel who have been asked by the board to be effectively the conscience of the business in relation to ESG. Do any of your legal teams have that sort of role?

Anushka Herath: It’s interesting to think about where ESG sits. You mentioned this GC has been asked to step up as a conscience of the company. I wonder if it’s because nobody else quite wants it. It isn’t quite finance. It isn’t quite risk. Is it marketing, because it’s all about your brand and how you show up externally? There’s a legal and a regulatory element to it. It’s such a cross-functional area. It’s hugely the priority for the banking industry. I don’t think I would necessarily want for legal’s only role to be the conscience. It’s quite limiting.

Terie Liu: I don’t think it’s incumbent on one person or even just the legal team, because I think that might be quite hard. It also depends on who you have in that role, because obviously everyone’s ethics and decisions and values are different, and even their view on where the business should go. For us it’s easier because it’s a family-owned business. We don’t have multiple shareholders to report to. It’s very much down to one person. A lot of the time, it’s ultimately his decisions as to where he wants the business to go. If his and the views of the GC or another senior member of leadership don’t align, then the CEO makes the final call. A lot of the time, it could be seen as, ‘No. You cannot do that’, but the business sees this as we are taking business risk. So, it also depends on the organisation you work for.

‘I don’t think it’s incumbent on one person or even just the legal team to be the conscience of the company, that might be quite hard.’
Terie Liu, Shiva Hotels

Colin Fowler, Church & Dwight: I’m not comfortable with the GC being the sole course corrector or the conscience. It’s a CEO thing. A board decision is made. The CEO is given the task of implementing it, and the GC and the other functions will comment, course correct and do their bit. I don’t think it’s right that the GC is the only person who is steering the ship because keeping the correct course is so pervasive and has such big implications for the business. The GC certainly has a safety-net function.

Aurea Garrido: What we have at the moment is an ethics and compliance team, but it is a legal team dedicated only to that. I wouldn’t want to touch that. The lawyers are trained in that and it is their area of the business, but it is their only area of the business. The ethics team is a legal team. They are completely separate.

David Halliwell: How many of you have legal ops functions?

Aurea Garrido: We have it.

Natasha Doulia: We do but not enough. In the future, we’re going to have more.

Terie Liu: It was not a thing five years ago.

Alexandra Morris, Pinsent Masons Vario: There are adverts for jobs asking for a legal ops person with ten years’ experience.

Colin Fowler: We have a legal ops function, but it is more doing the billing, forecasting, document management and all that kind of thing. Full-blown CLM we’re not doing yet.

Joy Van Cooten: What I have found is that legal ops in the UK and legal ops in the US are different. My title was head of legal operations – EMEA and everyone thought my function was legal ops, but I was actually just head of legal – EMEA.

Aurea Garrido: My legal ops here in London is someone legally trained that I can give a precedent and say, ‘Transfer me that into something that could generate contracts.’ I decide with her what needs approval. For example, if you change an entry, you need approval from legal, but if you change only the date or the fees, you do not. Also how does it go to signature, all of that. That person does all of that and it is truly quite a lot of work.

Anushka Herath: Why do you have headcount insourced for that? Does it work better to have someone in the team full-time working on that rather than externally partnering with some kind of alternative, like managed services?

Colin Fowler: They really need to know how it all works, what the business is about and who the teams are. You would have to have someone external sitting in the business for a significant time before they were remotely ready.

Natasha Doulia: They can also look at your efficiencies, what you can automate and what you can’t. That’s a full-time job. In my opinion legal teams may end up with fewer lawyers and more tech people. To be honest, like you, I am not a tech person, but I can sure as hell do training, or at least someone that I can ask who understands it and maybe can explain it to me in layman’s terms.

Nathalie Tidman: There is this fear that technology will replace people up to a certain skill level. Is that a real pressure?

Terie Liu: Not yet for me. In private practice, I always found it easier to work with partners who were really experienced and hands on. You had the other partners who left you to do whatever, and you just sink or swim without that progression. In-house, it’s more about specialising. There are things you just do not know about until you go into the business and understand what they do. Previously, for me anyway, you sat in an office, and you pumped out documents, but you didn’t know the nuances of X, Y and Z. It isn’t just legal training; it isn’t just ops training. It’s getting that holistic view, sitting in the business.

David Halliwell: I have never heard of a point in the financial cycle when legal was not under budgetary pressure. There’s always pressure to cut costs. Presumably that’s a constant.

Joy Van Cooten: It is a constant.

Colin Fowler: It is. I find it quite a difficult conversation to have. It’s not as though this is the first time we’ve heard this. We’re many years into this. Corporate deals were supposed to be completely different by now. 50% or 80% of it was supposed to be done by AI. It wasn’t done that way in the last deal I was on. AI still played a fairly small part.

‘I have never heard of a point in the financial cycle when legal was not under budgetary pressure.’
David Halliwell, Pinsent Masons Vario

However, you don’t want to come across as a luddite. Fortunately, immediately before entering FMCG, I was in the tech industry, and before that I was an IP/technology lawyer. I can say, ‘Look, I’m not a luddite. I get it.’ We thought we’d be miles down the road by now, and we aren’t there yet. ChatGPT might be able to write you the most amazing proposal, or whatever it is, but we’re probably not where you think we’re at in terms of replacing specialised legal headcount just yet. We still need the headcount in order to succeed.

Aurea Garrido: Yes, the headcount thing is so difficult. If anything, it’s more difficult than it was ten years ago.

David Halliwell: Have you looked at different resourcing models? We’re hearing of big corporates who are starting to build their own captive LPOs because they might not necessarily have had a good experience with a third-party LPO and they quite often have large service centres that are doing everything but legal. They are now starting to build the legal elements of that, particularly in India. Is that something any of your businesses are looking at?

Lucia Guijarro: Yes, it is things like service centre workers. They’re not properly employees. They do NDAs based on templates and stuff like that.

Aurea Garrido: No, we don’t have that in legal. I’ve seen that in other areas of the business, like in finance and IT but I don’t think it’s happening yet.

David Halliwell: Legal seems to be last in the queue because it’s all too difficult.

Anushka Herath: I think legal is the best at persuading the business why it shouldn’t be.

Nathalie Tidman: Is it still an attractive prospect to be a GC? Do people in your group of friends and colleagues still aspire to it as a lifestyle?

Anushka Herath: Yes, that desire is still there. The partnership route has lost a bit of the shine it had maybe ten years ago. In-house GC roles still have that kudos.

Aurea Garrido: When you’re talking about a big company like mine, you need to define ‘GC’. What do you mean by that? There are so many different divisions and so many different teams. Only a handful of people in a legal team of such a large company have the GC title. It’s about the size of the team you want to run. Are you happy with a small team or do you want a bigger team? For me at the moment, yes, I definitely want to run a team, whatever title they give me, AGC or whatever it is.

Natasha Doulia: I agree with you. I still aspire to GC, but what does it mean? I always thought I did want to become GC. Maybe since Covid –I’ve questioned it. There’s a lot more pressure. I can still get the things I like out of the job and I can still get board and ExCo exposure without having to do that. Is it worth it or not?

Joy Van Cooten: The higher you climb, the less legal work you do. It’s about getting that balance. The amount of day-to-day legal work I do is shrinking.

Colin Fowler: Our GC is a career New York corporate lawyer. We need to do SEC filings, on which so much depends, and which need to be right every time. Some companies view having listed company experience in the jurisdiction where the company is headquartered as very important, and that can present a challenge to those from elsewhere. Aside from the global CLO/GC job, if you have regional responsibility and you’re part of an executive team, it depends how much autonomy you have. Okay, you’re not at the absolute top table, but you are at the regional top table. If you have a good degree of autonomy and if you work with some nice people and all the rest of it, then that can be a rewarding place to be. LB

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‘I came into law by accident,’ admits Sebastian Goldsmith, general counsel (GC) of occupational health service provider Medigold Health. ‘I guess it was a second choice. I did Spanish and Portuguese at university, and I was going to work for an investment bank, as I did an internship with HSBC during my year abroad in São Paulo. The plan was to join them or another bank when I graduated. But all intakes were withdrawn, because it was August 2008,’ Goldsmith recalls.

The onset of the global financial crisis created a dilemma: ‘I sat there and thought, what am I going to do now? People always said to me, you should be a lawyer, because I have a strong sense of justice and fairness, and I liked a debate, and I’m quite verbal. So I went to BPP and did law school.’

It was towards the end of his time at BPP that Goldsmith discovered he was dyslexic. ‘I had some issues with exams and I went and saw the dean. I said to him, “I don’t understand, I prepared, I’ve never failed an exam before in my life.” He showed me my manuscripts and said, “I’ve seen this before. I think you’re dyslexic.”’

The results of an assessment proved revealing. ‘The clinical psychologist told me I was very high on the verbal scale, but I was compensating, because my physical speed and my memory are really low,’ he explains. ‘It really chimed with my experience. I sent her all my old school reports, and it was so obvious when I looked back that I had always had this issue.’

How did his diagnosis affect him? ‘It shook my confidence. I went from excelling to worrying I’d be slower than everyone else.’

‘You have to do very sharp deep dives into different areas of law, generate an answer for the business, and move on. I don’t think I’ve ever been so fulfilled as a lawyer.’

Still, Goldsmith graduated in 2010 and won a training contract at Nabarro, which merged with CMS in May 2017. ‘I found a role in investment fund law, which suited the way my brain worked quite nicely, as there was not a lot of black-letter law – it was mostly negotiation, and complex but logical contract terms.’

Remembering the interview with Nabarro that landed him his training contract, Goldsmith breaks into a smile: ‘The main thing I remember talking about was the time I played cricket for Brazil. When I was in São Paulo, I was looking for somewhere to watch the cricket world cup. I got in touch with the São Paulo team and they suggested I come down and play. So I did. I had a good time, bowled a few balls for some of the players. Then they asked what I was doing next week. I told them I was working at HSBC. They said: “Oh, HSBC sponsors us, why don’t you come to the South American Cricket Championship in Lima?”’

His bosses at HSBC allowed him to go, he played with the team and had what he describes as an ‘amazing’ experience. The lesson here? Goldsmith quips: ‘Cricket opens doors!’

On a professional note, he insists that one of the most important pieces of advice he has received in his career is not to be too worried about the opinions of others.

Another early lesson was the value of having attention to detail. ‘At Nabarro, former partner Andrew Wylie taught me the importance of precision in everything that you put in writing, and to always think about what the other side might do with every single one of your words.’ An Australian colleague put it more succinctly. ‘Darren Stolzenberg had a Queenslander version: “Mate – just think!” As a dyslexic perfectionist, particularly in-house, I have to balance that against the mantra of “good enough” so that I can remain efficient. But as a legal grounding, it was invaluable.’

Goldsmith moved from Nabarro to a role as an associate at Latham & Watkins in September 2015. Then came the decision to leave private practice. ‘I was about to start a family, so I decided to move in-house at an Australian investment fund, IFM Investors,’ he explains.

Within a couple of years, though, he began to feel ‘pigeon-holed’. ‘Investment fund law is very niche,’ he says. ‘The tasks you undertake, both in private practice and in-house, are very specific. It was difficult to get exposure to wider areas of law.’

Goldsmith’s father, Dr Mike Goldsmith, founded Medigold Health in 1998 and his brother Alex became its chief executive in 2014. Just as the limits of investment fund law began to chafe, Medigold reached the stage in its growth where it sought to hire a GC. ‘I was thinking about getting experience as a GC. I spoke to my brother and he said, the family business needs a lawyer, why don’t you come and work with us?’

He interviewed with chief financial officer (CFO) Eliot Caulton and got the job. He still reports to Caulton, to maintain professional distance from his chief executive brother. It is a role that has allowed Goldsmith to thrive. ‘I love being faced with five or six different areas of law every day,’ he enthuses. ‘My first week at Medigold was the week before lockdown, so I was immediately buying PPE from China. You have to become an expert, at least enough to do your job, in a lot of different areas, very quickly. You have to do very sharp deep dives into different areas of law, generate an answer for the business, and move on. I don’t think I’ve ever been so fulfilled as a lawyer,’ he says.

Goldsmith is firmly of the view that a GC should take a strategic role in the business. ‘There’s a huge debate in the in-house world about whether we need to be a strategic partner. Absolutely we do. I’m massively against legal being a blocker. We need to help the business find ways to do what it wants to do.’

That attitude has allowed him to implement a few improvements to the legal function. ‘I’ve now got a paralegal, which is brilliant. I’ve implemented a contract life-cycle management system. I’ve hired a compliance person, as well as a full-time data protection officer.’

He also notes the growing importance of ESG as a key issue facing Medigold, citing an increasing role for the GC as ‘ethical voice’ of the business. ‘A couple of years ago, we decided that we wanted to revamp our CSR strategy and aim towards B Corp as a framework for our ESG endeavours. We hired an excellent part-time head who reports to me, so I have visibility over our ESG strategy.’

The business has also grown on Goldsmith’s watch. ‘In March, we acquired a business that was the size of our business, so we’ve doubled in size. We’re working out how to implement ESG. A lot of that is data and fact-finding. We’re working out our scope one and two emissions, and scope three is next. That requires buy-in across all stakeholders, and our investors have bought in. It’s slow going, but going well.’

Looking forward, Goldsmith sees his role as ‘continuing to build out the function’.

‘In a time of a lot of growth, and with a national shortage of clinicians, we have to be smart about where we spend our money. We have to maximise the efficiency of the legal function of the business. We’re implementing legal tech to support me and the commercial teams on that. We’re focusing on tech generally, to assist us in growing through the next phase.

‘We need to make sure we have robust governance, and that it’s demonstrable. We’re centralising a lot of functions to make sure things aren’t siloed,’ Goldsmith says. ‘A lot of my work is not so much on the black-letter legal side, but on governance and strategy more broadly. We’re looking at where our growth is going to be. I’m involved in all those conversations, and that’s quite satisfying.’

Amid all this change, though, Goldsmith takes care to make time for a life outside the business. ‘Nick Benson at Latham taught me it’s possible to be a family man and an excellent lawyer,’ he says. Goldsmith lives in Northamptonshire with his wife and two young children, and relishes the work-life balance that flexible working makes possible.

For his part, Goldsmith lacks the time for the creative writing and blogging that he enjoyed when he was younger (‘much younger’, he jokes), but he notes: ‘I still have plans to potentially write something – God knows what!’

He still finds time for video games, albeit less so now he has a family. ‘It’s a good way to wind down,’ he says. ‘It’s kind of looked down upon, but I don’t see why. You’re exercising your motor skills, imagination, and hippocampus – and it’s an escape.’

In addition to his love of Arsenal, for which he holds season tickets, Goldsmith also enjoys food and drink. ‘It’s a bit annoying,’ he laughs. ‘I’ve grown this beard, and at the same time I’ve ended up into coffee and barbecuing. I used to feel out of place in East London, but now I’ve become kind of a clichéd hipster.’

‘If you bring your whole self to work, that benefits everyone. Disability is probably the characteristic that gets focused on the least.’

Aside from his habitual self-deprecation, perhaps what shines through the most about Goldsmith is his passion for inclusivity.

‘When I was first diagnosed with dyslexia, I did get some comments, from old-school types. They’d say things like, “well you’re not going to get 50% extra time with clients, so how are you going to manage?”

‘I can understand it from a law firm’s point of view, to a degree. You’re seen as a tool that needs to be utilised. But I don’t find the billable hour an amazing predictor of value. Both as a client now and when I used to be on the other side,’ he argues.

‘The thing is, if you bring your whole self to work, that benefits everyone. Disability is probably the characteristic that gets focused on the least. It’s so often the tiniest footnote on the end of a talk about diversity. Dyslexia, compared to some of the more profound disabilities, is probably on the minor end.

‘But I do think that the more different brain types and the more different perspectives you can get in an organisation, the more effective you can be. I like the #DyslexicThinking movement by Richard Branson, and Made By Dyslexia on LinkedIn.’

Goldsmith concludes bullishly on the topic: ‘And it’s not just about getting people in. It’s about active inclusion as well. People often use the analogy that, being invited is diversity, and being asked to dance is inclusion. I do agree with that. There’s no point getting people with different viewpoints into your organisation if you don’t take steps to include them.’

alexander.ryan@legalease.co.uk

The post The Client Profile: Sebastian Goldsmith, Medigold Health appeared first on Legal Business.

Aleksandra Schellenberg, UBS’ global head of legal sustainable finance, knew she wanted to be a lawyer from the age of 14, revealing that she made her decision after watching the first episode of American legal comedy drama Ally McBeal, while growing up in Poland in the late 1990s.

She recalls: ‘I remember after watching the show, going to my mum and telling her I wanted to be a lawyer and she said, “Hey honey, we don’t have any lawyers in the family, that might be a bit difficult!”

‘I wanted to be a lawyer and I decided to invest all of my energy into achieving it. Little did I know at the time that it would not always be like Ally McBeal.’

Schellenberg studied law in Poland for her undergraduate degree, heading to university in Austria in her last year for six months on a scholarship to study international law, where she realised that she ‘operates in an international environment way better than in a domestic one’.

After graduating, Schellenberg was unsure of what kind of lawyer she wanted to be. She decided to apply for some internships, ending up as an intern for a month at the Polish Embassy in Switzerland, which she enjoyed for its combination of law, diplomacy and international relations.

After completing her internship, she spent a year in New York working as a diplomat for the Polish Consulate. During this time, Schellenberg contacted the United Nations to express her interest in contributing to some workshops on a voluntary basis.

‘After a while, someone from the UN suggested that I apply for an internship. I always thought you had to have connections to work there, but I sent my CV for an internship in Bangkok, and you know what? They called me back! They asked to schedule an interview and I was still in denial – I just thought they were doing it for the diversity and inclusion statistics, you know – Polish girl, Eastern Europe.’

Perhaps unsurprisingly to everyone other than herself, Schellenberg was accepted onto the UN internship, moving to Thailand in 2011 for six months.

She reflects: ‘When I worked for the United Nations, I saw how powerful lawyers can be in the human rights space and how big of a difference legal expertise can make. After the UN, I wanted to help people in a more tangible way. I thought there must be an environment where I could have an even bigger impact.’

For Schellenberg, operating in financial services and making a positive impact are not mutually exclusive: ‘I realised that the financial industry is the perfect place for lawyers to combine their legal and commercial expertise to help businesses reroute financial flows to build an offering for clients who, not only want to earn money, but make a positive change in other people’s lives. Many people want to do well by also doing good.’

Schellenberg started working for multinational investment bank UBS as its in-house legal counsel in 2012. The irony of such a seemingly dramatic shift is not lost on her. ‘I always laugh about what my next employer might think because I went from working in diplomacy and human rights to suddenly working in an investment bank.’

Schellenberg explains the rationale behind going in-house rather than into private practice: ‘I strongly believe that the quality of your legal advice is as strong as your understanding of the business you cover. I wanted to be the best lawyer I could be and one way to achieve this is to work hand-in-hand with your business. This way, you are involved in the entire process and get a chance to identify legal risks you might not notice otherwise.’

Schellenberg worked in the UBS IB derivatives documentation legal team for two years, after which she moved to the global wealth management division, which she describes as ‘brilliant, because they had a sustainable investment department’.

Following changes to EU regulations in 2019 and the implementation of the European Green Deal, Schellenberg says: ‘I had one of the biggest “wow!” moments of my life. I contacted my big bosses and told them what was coming our way. At the time, everyone understood sustainability from a legal and regulatory standpoint.

‘In the market, ESG was heavily built on international voluntary standards. Companies could cherry-pick and become part of ESG-related initiatives. For some firms, there was a tendency to join those initiatives just to put the label of the UN on the marketing material to say that they were a member, without really following any of the rules the membership required – because they didn’t have to.’

‘When I worked for the United Nations, I saw how powerful lawyers can be in the human rights space and how big of a difference legal expertise can make.’

In 2019, Schellenberg started to build a network within UBS’ group legal department in Switzerland and Europe, with the aim of understanding the practical impact of the Green Deal with a focus on sustainable investment in Europe.

The network initially had eight lawyers covering only European investments and grew to more than 40 lawyers covering all things ESG across the globe.

Schellenberg recalls: ‘I was doing my global wealth management work while handling all this ESG stuff. In 2019 we only saw the tip of the iceberg and the work just kept piling up. I realised I couldn’t do both. This was the moment I saw an amazing opportunity to create an ESG-only team and build it as part of our legal group.’

And so the sustainable finance legal team came into being. ‘ESG is brilliant because it helps us to practise law, be commercial and help the bank transfer the money into good causes – sustainable lending for instance,’ she notes.

‘If you want to be an ESG lawyer and you do not like to work with people, this is not the job for you. It requires so much collaboration – not only in the legal division but also with compliance, risk and finance. You have to understand the business to work out how they can improve.’

Schellenberg reflects on the biggest challenges for her legal team and in the wider market. ‘The main challenge of today is to take control of the regulatory tsunami in the ESG space. We need to understand what is coming our way in terms of laws and regulations and what it means for our business, particularly if you work in a company with a global reach. It is crucial to stay relevant to the business partners and advise them in a way that doesn’t lead to conflicting outcomes, or reinventing the wheel every time a new legal act emerges on the horizon.’

‘The main challenge of tomorrow will be keeping the consistency across the ESG-related message we — as one organisation — are sending to clients, investors and to the public.’

Looking ahead, she argues: ‘The main challenge of tomorrow will be keeping the consistency across the ESG-related message we, as one organisation, are sending to clients, investors and to the public. We will need to make sure that what our group entities say they aspire to achieve in the short, medium and long- term is consistent with the disclosures at the level of products and services individual divisions offer.’

The obvious question is how ESG policies have fed into UBS’ high-profile takeover in March of the collapsed Credit Suisse, the global investment bank perhaps latterly better known for countless scandals than its financial services offering.

Drawing on her previous experience as a diplomat, Schellenberg says: ‘I will say that ESG is definitely a high priority topic that is being carefully looked at.’

She also speaks about founding her own social media platform focused on women’s wellbeing two years ago. ‘Speaktacular is a fully anonymous space for women to be 100% themselves, where they can speak to each other about any topic without judgement and empower one another. I love seeing all these fantastic ladies who visit Speaktacular.me to let it all out and tell the world what drives them mad, or what makes them feel proud, or to listen to others and help them. No-one tells them or asks them to do it, but they do it because they understand that five minutes of their attention can make a big difference to someone else´s life.’

And what of UBS’ ESG goals for the next year? Schellenberg is bullish: ‘Our mission does not change. We want to be the financial provider of choice for clients who wish to mobilise capital towards the achievement of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and the orderly transition to a low-carbon economy.’

ayesha.ellis@legalease.co.uk

The post The Client Profile: Aleksandra Schellenberg, UBS appeared first on Legal Business.