GCs from leading companies discuss the transition of the GC role from mainly legal to more
This year’s NZ In-house Legal Summit tackles the hot topics in the country’s in-house legal landscape.
In-house experts from Chubb Insurance, Vodafone and Samsung will talk about how legal departments can be aligned with business strategy. The discussion will cover points such as:
“How well a business performs depends a lot on how well the business is able to navigate and implement change. As strategic partner to the business, a crucial role of the legal department is to understand that change and guide the business through it,” Joanna Khoo, head of legal and regulatory and company secretary at Chubb Insurance New Zealand, told NZ Lawyer. “Legal and regulatory environments also often require the legal department itself to drive change, not just within the legal department, but across the business. As they say, change is the only constant. There are some useful strategies that the legal department can adopt to manage change and position itself as an effective adviser.”
Employment law specialist firm SBM Legal will also highlight critical developments in the field that organisations need to pay attention to as we head into 2021 in a special talk, while NewLaw firm Juno Legal joins in on a panel talking about the adoption of technology by legal departments to improve workload management and boost efficiency.
“Winston Churchill said to never waste a good crisis. For the majority of legal teams and firms, the global pandemic was the perfect motivator to roll out new technology solutions to support remote working – or in more than a few cases, work out what their existing technology could do. Many legal teams have now embraced technology to enable better ways of working,” Juno Legal lawyer and legal technologist Matt Farrington told NZ Lawyer. “But while technology may enable innovation, just buying a new piece of software is not innovative on its own.”
Farrington points to video conferencing as an example.
“VC is a fantastic tool to support remote and flexible working arrangements, and lockdown was a great leveller for this – everyone was on video and had to figure out how to work the technology properly,” he said. “But as we approach our new normal, will this continue? Or will we fall back on old habits and insist on face-to-face meetings, and that one person who isn't able to be physically present ‘dialled in’ as an afterthought?”
The full agenda for the NZ In-house Legal Summit 2020 can be found here. The event will be held on 1 December at the Hilton Auckland.
