The Conversation
Over the past year, Law.com's Trudy Knockless interviewed some of the nation's top chief legal officers and general counsel who shared some lessons from their lives and their careers that helped them navigate risk and business uncertainty.
Hossein Nowbar, chief legal officer of Microsoft,described how "you have to have financial acumen, legal arguments and societal knowledge and bring everything together to create inclusive solutions. In some ways, my job is to make sure that our legal positions are informed by our engineering realities and that our engineering practices conform to our legal realities. And that's really brokering—it's brokering solutions."
He also shares that being an immigrant gives him a unique outlook to help with innovation and inclusion in times of division.
"As an immigrant, I've had a range of experiences that have placed me on both sides of the inclusion wall. These perspectives have underscored for me the importance of finding the truth in other people's perspectives. You could come from different backgrounds and have different challenges, but if you can really focus on the truth of what somebody else is saying and share your truth, you can build commonalities. Something that I learned as an immigrant kid that I apply to my work is to internalize those truths, internalize the other person's problems and make it your problem. And then be innovative and inclusive in finding a solution that satisfies that need."
Sophia Contreras Schwartz, general counsel of Nextdoor who runs a small but mighty legal department, has to adapt to a rapidly shifting regulatory landscape, combat hate speech and misinformation and deal with many other thorny issues as they arise. But she looks at it as a challenge.
"I've always loved doing diligence because I love the puzzle of all of it," said Schwartz. "You have this list of things you have to go out and find, and then you're looking for the things that might hurt or you have to explain.”
She goes on to say that managing a social platform is never dull. “We’re committed to being responsible operators and are constantly monitoring legislative developments in all our markets."
The Significance
No one can predict the future, but according to experts, there are things that should be part of your every day as a business and legal leader no matter what the political climate.
For example, Carolyn Amadon, lawyer, Global Trade professor, and trade law counselor for over 20 years, says that whatever is coming down the pike the key is to work with the C-Suite to maintain regulatory compliance.
“Trump intends to use tariffs as tools and threats to push forward policy goals quickly. We’ll see an injection of chaos into a system that was working fairly well. It will be very important to ensure global trade and regulatory compliance with support from specialized trade professionals at the strategic level, including the C-suite.”
Sean West, Co-Founder of Hence Technology, emphasizes the challenge new technology such as gen AI will also have on predicting and navigating risk.
“The stresses on the political economy that we have today will be very, very different than they were over the last four years. It has only been two years since generative AI is something that normal humans could talk about. By the time Trump’s second term is over, AI may be in a radically different place. That makes predicting the role AI will play in politics, the economy and justice system very hard.”
However, Tom Mattei, chief legal officer of Neiman Marcus, advises CLOs to rely on their skills to look at what may be coming down the pike and prepare the business accordingly.
“Part of being a good leader is taking complex situations and distilling them" into clear, actionable paths. “Even in complex situations, we can present the risk of the opportunity with as clear a head as possible, and we can provide a path for people to evaluate and make decisions.”
He also goes on to sum up the theme of this briefing: "It's really important to be comfortable being uncomfortable. We constantly are asked to operate in situations that are unfamiliar to us, that are in far from perfect conditions. We don't have all the information, but we have to be able to deal with that and move forward. We have to be able to operate in uncertainty. Also, you have to have a good enough sense to know when to get over your tips and you need to tap somebody else in and bring in somebody else's expertise."
