The FT top 15 in-house legal leaders

This year’s annual FT Business Legal Leaders series examines how senior in-house lawyers are responding to changing demands — from keeping up with developments in artificial intelligence to managing cyber threats and geopolitical risk.

The 15 in-house leaders featured below, selected by the FT’s Innovative Lawyers research partner RSGI, highlight how varied the role of general counsel has become.

They are all using various techniques to help their businesses achieve long-term aims. These include gaining expertise in the latest technologies, overhauling internal structures, engaging external advisers, and even campaigning for legal reform.

Tom Saunders, content director, RSGI
Profiles compiled by RSGI and FT editors; listed by company name in alphabetical order.

Dana Rao, general counsel and chief trust officer, Adobe

Dana Rao leads a team of more than 700 across Adobe’s legal, security and policy departments; he is using his expertise to help the design software company capitalise on the latest developments in generative artificial intelligence.

Adobe was one of the first companies to assume legal responsibility for any copyright infringement over material produced by software it offers to businesses, indemnifying users of its image-generation tool, Firefly, last June. Rao was involved in the product’s development and collaborated with engineers, copyright lawyers and AI ethics experts. This means Adobe can provide reassurance that the tool has been trained on either licensed content or information in the public domain.

Rao also helped launch and promote a new type of label, developed by Adobe and other companies, that can be added to images, videos and PDFs to show who owns the data and who created it, including whether it was made by AI. 

Spencer Collins, chief legal officer, Arm

Spencer Collins joined Arm as chief legal officer in 2022 to prepare the UK chipmaker for its initial public offering in 2023. He led Arm’s conversations with the UK government about where it would float (Arm listed in the US instead of its home market) and a complete overhaul of the company’s corporate governance and procedures.

He joined Arm from SoftBank Investment Advisers, the investment manager of SoftBank Vision Fund, where he was general counsel during the termination of Nvidia’s proposed acquisition of SoftBank-owned Arm in 2022.

Collins says morale at Arm was low when he joined. His response included creating a personal development plan for all 50 members of the global legal team. These changes resulted in the legal team having the highest morale scores in Arm’s annual survey. 

Thomas Clark, general counsel, Asian Development Bank

It was the middle of the Covid pandemic when Thomas Clark joined the Asian Development Bank. At the time, he says, its goals were at risk of slipping and the institution was still dealing with problems arising from the 2008 financial crisis. 

Clark strengthened the bank’s “law and policy reform programme”, which aims to set up effective legal and judicial systems across Asia and the Pacific region. This plan includes making structural changes, such as appointing someone to manage relationships with the judiciary and giving law and policy projects the same weight as the bank’s transactional work in lawyers’ annual reviews. 

Clark is particularly proud of his team’s work in helping to develop the UN’s model forest act initiative, a legal framework to protect woodlands.    

Sandrine Auffret, chief legal counsel and company secretary, ASML

When Sandrine Auffret joined Dutch chipmaking equipment manufacturer ASML in 2021, after 20 years in the healthcare industry, the company started growing rapidly as global demand surged for semiconductors that could power the latest technology.

One of her priorities was to expand the legal department. The team, which was 37-strong when she joined, now has more than 100 staff. Within nine months, Auffret had centralised the disparate legal functions and installed a new leadership team. 

She describes the legal department’s role as building relationships across the organisation and contributing to company strategy to support expansion. Changes she has made include establishing a legal operations team of 10 people and defining job roles and development. 

Rick Sharma, chief legal adviser, and Tracey Yurko, chief legal officer and corporate secretary, Bridgewater Associates

Rick Sharma and Tracey Yurko played significant roles in supporting the hedge fund through the founder Ray Dalio’s transition out of the firm.

The process has taken close to 12 years. It has involved Yurko helping to structure the board and governance in such a way that allows Dalio to have a voice, without being overpowering. She has also led a series of debt and equity transactions to raise funds for the employee ownership scheme.

Sharma has focused on bringing new skills into the legal team, to help Bridgewater diversify its offering. This year, the firm set up a $2bn machine learning and AI fund. Members of the legal team studied data science and worked with the firm’s AI and automation group, AIA Labs, to create a place for experimentation.

The legal department operates under the culture of “radical transparency” that the firm is known for — which means meetings in the department are recorded and employees can give feedback about anyone in the organisation, which their colleagues can view.

Bob Hoyt, group chief legal officer, HSBC

Bob Hoyt describes his move in 2021 from Barclays to HSBC as like moving industries because of the larger global footprint of HSBC. The legal team has to cover a broad variety of issues across different jurisdictions, Hoyt notes.

When Hoyt joined HSBC, it was recovering from a deferred prosecution agreement for flawed money-laundering controls, which cost the bank a then record $1.92bn in fines. Hoyt has since focused on the bank’s restructuring, leading on recent transactions that include selling off the bank’s Canada business and retail arm in France, subsequent acquisitions in Singapore and India, and the rescue of Silicon Valley Bank for £1.

To support these ambitions, Hoyt has established a legal operations unit of around 100 professionals with experience in contracting, organisation design, process improvement, and e-discovery. He says the multidisciplinary team is helping the legal department to respond to the bank’s requests faster. 

Kerry McLean, general counsel and corporate secretary, Intuit

Kerry McLean leads the policy team at US accountancy and software company Intuit, which is campaigning for small businesses to be included in developing AI regulatory frameworks in the country. She says AI and privacy regulations typically focus on large technology businesses and overlook the smaller organisations — such as dry cleaners, coffee shops and florists — that Intuit serves.

She has fostered diversity within the legal team, seeking and hiring candidates from a broader range of schools and colleges, and offering internships to first-year law students, as well as graduate and undergraduate students. This year, the company took in seven interns in its law and policy department. 

Kenji Tagaya, executive officer and head of the legal and secretariat division, Jera

Kenji Tagaya joined Jera’s strategic legal department in 2016, a year after the business was founded. Promoted to the top legal role in 2019, Tagaya focuses most on helping Jera, which is now Japan’s largest power company, to establish a global supply chain of hydrogen and ammonia. That has required the team to adapt its approach to different regions, due to the inconsistencies in legal frameworks.

Since 2015, the company has grown from around 40 people to a global organisation of almost 6,000. Tagaya says setting up the legal operations function five years ago has helped the business to expand and improve the consistency of its services across the US, UK, Australia, and Singapore. Tagaya has also taken on responsibility for the group-wide implementation of the organisation’s compliance and ethics programme.

Áine Rafferty, chief legal officer, KX

Áine Rafferty joined the financial data analytics company KX, a division of FD Technologies, in 2017. Since she joined, she says the legal team has been the “constant in the chaos”.

During her tenure, KX has changed both its product suite and its entire leadership team, which means the legal team has worked with four different chief revenue officers in four years, Rafferty notes.

To cope with these changes, Rafferty has focused on collecting data to demonstrate the commercial value of the legal team to the business. This meant measuring the volume and types of requests it receives, detailing their complexity and the specific workload of each team member. She has also cut the negotiation time on contracts with KX customers.

Damon Hart, chief legal officer and secretary, Liberty Mutual

Damon Hart leads a global legal and compliance team of more than 2,000 at insurance company Liberty Mutual. The Covid pandemic resulted in a more globally dispersed team and Hart has since tried to make legal advice as accessible as possible to the business through shared services and technology for more routine work. He has also appointed generalists in his team to act as points of contact within the wider business, guiding requests towards more specialist advisers.  

Hart is working to reduce the impact of what he describes as “legal system abuse”, defined by him as plaintiff-attorney or litigation-funding practices that drive up claims costs faster than the rate of inflation. Hart leads a team to address this problem by campaigning for tort reform, educating policyholders and building cross-industry coalitions with pharmaceutical and manufacturing companies. 

Isabelle Deschamps, chief legal, governance and corporate affairs officer, Rio Tinto

When Isabelle Deschamps started at Rio Tinto in 2021, the mining company was recovering from the fallout from its destruction of ancient and sacred Aboriginal caves in Australia the previous year. She also had to deal early on with a damning external report on the company’s workplace culture. 

One way in which Deschamps is attempting to remedy the situation is by setting up a care hub to make it easier for employees at the company’s sites worldwide, which are often in remote locations, to access welfare support.

This is achieved through a mix of support staff on the ground, phone lines, and alternative conflict resolution methods that have been developed by listening to indigenous groups affected by its mining activities. Since its launch in 2023, the care hub has handled more than 600 cases. 

Tim Mackey, chief legal officer and group compliance officer, SoftBank Group

The Japanese investment group’s desire to make a major bet on artificial intelligence led Tim Mackey to set up an innovation group within the legal department with responsibility for developing the company’s knowledge on AI and ethics. He has also enrolled on a university course on the topic.

Mackey encourages the group’s external advisers to use AI and has introduced clauses into SoftBank’s master services agreements, which include adhering to SoftBank’s AI ethics policy.

Meanwhile, its legal team has developed its own set of due diligence questions relating to AI for prospective investments and introduced specific representations, warranties and covenants to test the understanding of a target company’s use of the technology.

Omiyinka Doris, group general counsel, Veon

Omiyinka Doris took the top legal role at Veon in October 2022, during a particularly challenging time for the Dutch telecommunications group, as it was preparing to sell its Russian business, Beeline. Its share price had fallen by more than 80 per cent following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Veon had sizeable operations in both Russia and Ukraine, so it needed to navigate both Ukrainian and Russian sanctions. Doris led on sanctions licence applications in the UK, the US, the Netherlands, and Bermuda — and obtained all the regulatory approvals so the company could make a smooth exit from Russia.

Doris is now concentrating on sustaining Veon’s operations in Ukraine, where its corporate rights are still frozen. Its biggest shareholder is LetterOne, the investment vehicle set up by sanctioned billionaire Mikhail Fridman. Fridman stepped down as director in 2022, when the sanctions were imposed.  

Katja Roth Pellanda, group general counsel, Zurich Insurance Group 

Katja Roth Pellanda is collaborating with the in-house legal departments of other organisations, including Microsoft and UBS Bank, to develop Zurich’s legal team.  

Lawyers participate in several initiatives to develop new skills, such as running workshops with the legal team at Microsoft to learn about AI. The team also runs a secondment programme with UBS in which two to three lawyers are swapped between organisations to broaden their understanding of financial markets.

Roth Pellanda also leads an internal training programme for regional general counsel from across the business. Twice a year, the group undertakes scenario training on topics such as responding to a cyber attack or a climate catastrophe. Roth Pellanda is exploring an expansion of this activity to include other in-house legal teams.