In the ever-evolving landscape of compliance and regulation, professionals like Saffron Gilbert-Kaluba have been at the forefront of driving change and adapting to the dynamic challenges of the legal world.
In this exclusive interview, we delve into Saffron’s insights on the most significant shifts in compliance and regulation over the past year, the opportunities and challenges presented by artificial intelligence in the legal realm, and her vision for fostering innovation within the legal industry.
Bradley Collins: Hi Saffron, it’s great to see the awesome work you’re doing in the compliance space. What are the biggest compliance / regulatory shifts you’ve witnessed in the last 12 months?
Saffron Gilbert-Kaluba: The biggest compliance/regulatory shifts that I have witnessed, when it comes to working within the field through The Law Chronicle, is seeing how legal and compliance teams are now being used by organisations as a key factor in driving their overall corporate strategies.
The number one misconception about the legal function in business today is that it is only capable of solving the specialist legal problems for their company/organisation. However, if utilised correctly, legal functions can help drive a company’s targets for the better. For example, the global real estate industry is worth $326.5 trillion as growth has been insanely driven by residential real estate demand. The compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of real estate is expected to expand by 5.2% from 2022 to 2030. The billionaire developer Charles Cohen, who has a real estate empire of millions of square feet of office space across the USA, is positive about the future of real estate. This is despite corporate real estate seeing a financial downturn and uncertainty due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of working from home – a framework that has persisted for at least 40% of the UK working population. This year, Cohen declared that, in real estate, to survive and thrive for the many new opportunities “you’ve got to be very defensive.” Having a defensive strategy in real estate firstly means making sure that your legal function is not only dealing with your company’s general legal matters. It also means having the legal function of a company drive its corporate strategy in how to best protect and invest in further assets, utilising law to make more savvy business decisions.
Moreover, in a literal sense, companies such as Microsoft are even implementing their legal compliance functions to build products to put on the market with software such as Microsoft Copilot which recently partnered with Thomson Reuters.
Therefore, it is a huge misconception to relegate the legal function in business to solely a legal in-house purpose, when legal functions in the last 12 months have delivered overall business targets for their organisations. This uncertain global climate dealing with the post COVID-19 pandemic environment, the global economy, Brexit, technological innovation, international conflict, environmental, social and governance concerns are the key determinators for driving regulation and compliance. Consequently, in the last 12 months the industry has seen a shift in how involved compliance and regulatory departments are integral to not only keeping within the boundaries of law and policies, but also in how it can lead to driving innovative corporate strategies.
Bradley Collins: Would also love to hear your views on the challenges and opportunities that AI presents to compliance leaders?
Saffron Gilbert-Kaluba Artificial intelligence presents the opportunities of legal technologies which provide regulatory expertise. For example, technologies which synthesise industry and commercial intelligence, to give a pragmatic understanding of regulatory shifts to assist organisations in successfully delivering their business goals.
Regulation is a pivotal determinant of the strategic agenda for companies and firms. As aforementioned, evolving consumer demands and behaviours, the need for financial stability and operational resilience, challenging economic conditions and environmental, social and governance (ESG) concerns are shaping the global regulatory framework.
That is why I predict technology will transform how legal departments operate and deliver services in the next three years through managing and anticipating developments in a single solution. This will eliminate the burden and costs of having to manually track multiple sources of regulatory information. Thus, allowing legal departments to make even more pragmatic decisions when it comes to compliance and reducing costs, time and labour for legal departments.
The challenges will be dealing with the hotly debated national and international regulation that the AI itself will have to comply with – together with ethical storing and usage of data on persons.
Bradley Collins: Finally, if there was anything you would change about the legal world, what would it be, and why?
Saffron Gilbert-Kaluba: One thing I would change about the legal world is its appetite for innovation. When it came to the technological boom in the past decade, the legal industry was one of the last to hop on the bandwagon. This is due to a sense of caution within the industry, when dealing with new notions. It comes with the territory of being a good legal professional, to mitigate as much risk as possible, even when it comes to technological innovations. The legal industry in the past few years has accepted that they must find ways to implement technology to remain up-to-date with the fastly advancing digital world around us – for example, implementing contract automation and M&A technology. However, there is still a lot more to do especially when it comes to adopting regulatory and compliance technology.
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