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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Lists and commentary researched and compiled by RSGI and FT editors
Almost any business’s in-house legal team that sets out to be innovative will face a struggle. Historically, these departments have been modestly resourced and seen by colleagues only as a support function — and even then the support is too often regarded as more of a hindrance than a help.
But the role of the general counsel and in-house legal teams has nevertheless been transformed in the past 20 years.
Since the 2008 financial crisis, more general counsel have been invited into the boardroom because of their abilities to see and manage risk, often bringing a different and wider perspective.
Some general counsel become so senior and influential that they move out of the legal role into other senior management jobs, such as Brad Smith, now president of Microsoft. Others include Kent Walker, now president of global affairs at Google and Alphabet, or Amy Weaver, who became chief financial officer at Salesforce and is now chief executive of humanitarian aid group Direct Relief.
20 years of outstanding individuals
Read about the other 80 individuals across four categories who collectively epitomise how the legal sector has changed since the Innovative Lawyers series began
Others have looked at how their legal department could become more relevant and fit to serve wider business needs. Some of the pioneers of this functional transformation include Bill Deckelman, who served at DXC Technology, Chee Kin Lam at DBS Bank, Anne Madden at Honeywell, Louise Pentland, while at Nokia and PayPal, and Rebecca Lim, while at Westpac. DXC experimented and set new legal industry standards via alternative resourcing; DBS Bank developed predictive data analytics in order to reduce exposure to financial risk; and Nokia both improved commercial contracting processes and modified the legal department’s structure to create more multidisciplinary teams.
Maria Varsellona general counsel at Unilever, falls into this group but has also most recently led on the whole consumer group’s experiments with AI, showing how much the culture and approach of in-house legal teams have changed. They have developed from reluctant adopters of technology to first movers and sometimes role models. Scott Offer’s team at Flex and Ulrike Schwarz-Runer’s at Boston Consulting Group also fall into this category. Brian Israel at Anthropic, the AI start-up, has been well placed to design a legal team from scratch that uses the technology.
Some general counsel are so attuned to the business that they seamlessly manage the roles of protector and commercial enabler. Falling into this group are Shannon Thyme Klinger of Moderna, Brent Irvin of Tencent and Santiago Martinez Garrido of Iberdrola. Craig Glidden, when at General Motors, notably embraced the challenges facing the auto sector and was active in lobbying the US government to allow driverless cars on to the road.
Innovating in-house requires a degree of boldness. Exemplifying this are Dan Troy who, when at GSK, tried to abolish the traditional system of law firms’ hourly billing, and John Zecca, who has enabled his in-house team at Nasdaq to generate revenue in its own right by providing risk consulting advice to clients.
Rosemary Martin has had many Innovative Lawyers recognitions since winning the first in-house award in 2007 as general counsel at Reuters, showing how in-house teams could act as creators of economic value for their companies.
Rounding out the list is Sabine Chalmers, now group general counsel at BT, whose legal team has featured in the most rankings of the FT Innovative Lawyers series. Chalmers was previously general counsel at another company in the list, AB InBev. She has fostered innovators in her teams, such as Matt Galvin who appears in the intrapreneurs list.
The list of those organisations whose legal teams have scored the most rankings in the Innovative Lawyers series also tells a tale of in-house innovation. Notable is the number of telecoms companies, including Telstra and Vodafone, which continue to foster pioneering in-house legal teams. The businesses in this sector face more regulatory and market upheaval than many, with legal teams expected to step up to deal with change.
Eight organisations listed are in the financial services sector, where the burden of complex compliance has pushed the in-house legal teams to expand and refine their use of regulatory data to better inform the business.
Similarly, the large IT services companies such as HPE, Honeywell, and Microsoft, and big consultancies such as Accenture, create environments that force their lawyers to innovate just to be able to deal with large volumes of complex commercial contracts at speed.
