Interim Group Chief Legal Officer — Controls

Neither a contracts review nor a compliance project

Clear contractual authority sounds like administrative housekeeping. It is not. Nor is it a review of every contract on file, or a policy drafted and circulated for acknowledgement. The question at the heart of this appointment is sharper: who can bind the group, to what, at what value and with what risk, and how does that answer hold as the business grows? Getting it wrong rarely shows up at signature. It shows up years later, in a liability cap nobody had authority to agree or an exclusivity clause that quietly constrains a strategy. The Interim Group Chief Legal Officer is appointed for 24 months, with executive authority, to settle that question before growth makes the exposure irreversible.

What the role will actually change

The chief legal officer decides how legal decisions are allocated and which signing limits country managers keep, and sets the proof a contract or claim needs before money, capacity or controls are committed on its strength across the multi-country scope. In contractual terms that means an authority matrix that people can apply without phoning the legal team: clear limits by value and by type of term, a short list of provisions that always need central approval, and a quick route for the genuine exception.

The authority goes further. The chief legal officer decides which legal commitments continue, wait or stop, and halts any legal proposal that leaves an expense or exposure with someone who never agreed to own it. Investment is declined where its case leaves out take-up, dependencies or downside. They decide how the legal leadership team is built and how issues are raised, and they arbitrate between the Regional President and operating leaders when the two pull apart. Much of the skill lies in telling a contract that needs a legal answer from one that needs a commercial decision someone has been avoiding.

A lawyer with an operator's nerve

You have led through restructuring, professionalisation and cost transformation, and in each you changed authority, funding or operating rhythm while the business kept running. The largest of those organisations brought in $610 million or more and employed at least 2,500 people across three or more countries. The Regional President will look for governance ethics at level 4, and at level 3 for transaction legal capability, handling disputes and investigations, and managing the board and its stakeholders. Your first real win here could well be a legal commitment you ended, not one you began, and you can defend that choice with evidence. You can put an open question to the Regional President without letting it stall the work, and you would halt a legal commitment even if some country heads still wanted it.

Two years in outline, and the selection

During the first ninety days a group contractual authority matrix should be agreed, setting the signing limits each country keeps and naming an accountable owner for each legal exception. Around month nine, contracts that sit outside the matrix should have been brought back within it or formally approved, and legal proposals without an owner stopped. By month 24 contractual authority should be embedded in the legal leadership structure, with an escalation route the group keeps using as it grows.

Week one opens with a confidential first call, by video, with the Regional President. In the third week the Risk Committee Chair takes you through a contractual problem; by week five you are in a room with the heads of the main functions; and the board as a whole meets you in the seventh week. Our response follows within four working days of each.