Pearson plc, aramco, Haleon, GSK, The Coca-Cola Company and Kimberly-Clark.
Bjarne has held senior legal positions at all these organisations, many as GC, having also worked at law firms, Sullivan & Cromwell LLP and White & Case LLP. A multi award-winning General Counsel and published author, this former professional actor today leads FjordStream Advisors, the provider of strategic consultancy to the legal profession.
Eight years on, your book, Building an Outstanding Legal Team, still resonates. Does this surprise you?
Coming into a large legal function as a first-time General Counsel is daunting. You must quickly get on top of issues such as culture, capabilities, technology, budget, external providers and more. This needs structure. So, I took my experience and the mistakes I made and put them into a three-step framework.
This comprises hardware, which refers to the measurable aspects of running a department, including budget, team structure, technology, etc.
The next step is around software, the less tangible aspects like culture, capabilities and leadership.
The last step deals with constants. These include strategy, ongoing change and the need to help people deal with them.
I think the book has stood the test of time because, while many things change, these critical pillars of leadership don’t.
What are the three greatest challenges facing in-house lawyers today?
Firstly, the element of uncertainty that runs through almost every issue in-house legal teams deal with. Navigating grey areas and making judgments based on imperfect information is where they earn their salary. The challenge here is to leverage data, include all relevant people and maximise the power of collective insight.
Secondly, the evolution of risk is a real challenge. Once treated as something specifically legal, risk today bleeds into reputational, financial, technology and many other considerations.
The third big challenge is the pressure to do more with less. The way for GCs to achieve this is to regard the legal function as a stand-alone business and themselves as the mini-CEO. That way, they can formulate legal operations, costs, technology and the delivery of legal services through a commercial prism.
How can GCs balance legal risks with their organisation’s strategic goals?
A good GC knows that not acting is a risk. Take AI for example. On one hand, rolling out an AI project is risky because the regulatory nature around the technology is still unclear. On the other hand, if AI gives you an opportunity to grow the business by 20% per year and you don’t take it – yet your rivals do – you won’t have a business for long.
So, the GC must calibrate legal risk with business risk and look at every dimension. It’s about avoiding silos and not restricting yourself to advising purely on legal risk. This is a major challenge because people tend to pin the tail on the legal donkey if things go wrong. Be prepared to be accountable – even when no single individual should be responsible – because that’s part of the nature of the GC role.
How can in-house lawyers support organisation-wide roll-out of AI?
By making large-scale changes in terms of awareness, capabilities, talent and structure across the legal department, AI affects every aspect of how an organisation operates, from legal, data privacy and regulatory issues to contractual and litigation risks. It’s also in almost every IT function so touches every employee in the organisation.
If AI hallucinates or leverages someone else’s intellectual property, problems will arise and track back to the legal team. So, AI isn’t a discrete issue. Legal needs to take a holistic approach to the impact of AI and consider every aspect of the organisation.
How can non-executive directorships (NEDs) support an in-house lawyer’s career?
Taking an NED is a great move for anyone on an executive team. It gives you empathy with a board by showing you a director’s vantage point of a situation and their accountability for decisions. It helps you discern the differences between good and bad board presentations, enabling you to pitch to your own directors with meaningful insight.
An NED will elevate your understanding of strategy and contextualise risk by widening your perspective to an enterprise-wide level. You’ll be exposed to external stakeholders and capital markets; all while being involved in decisions within an industry you have no historical expertise in. This hones your understanding of what's important.
And, as you're only there about five times a year, you have to look at things through a very different lens and get comfortable in an environment you’re unaccustomed to. For all those reasons, NEDs are really helpful.
What is your advice to people moving to roles in new geographies?
Develop cultural intelligence and understand the approach that a given culture takes to human behaviours. For example, how is trust built in this culture? Is it built on expertise or on relationships? How important is losing face and how will that affect your approach to conflicts and the level of candour you use?
Assess if you’re in a high context [understandings arise from indirect, non-verbal communication and social bonds] or a low context [communication is direct and explicit] culture. It's about the willingness to learn, to be curious and to observe what's happening around you. How are people interacting and how can you incorporate that into your approach?
How do you relax away from work?
I’m not good at relaxing in the traditional sense. I love my work and I enjoy thinking about it, reading about it and speaking about it. I don’t find what I do stressful so rarely feel the need to escape from it.
That said, I do, of course, enjoy other things. I like to keep fit and particularly enjoy cooking. I love the creative aspect of tweaking recipes to my own taste. I also love reading. I read voraciously and enjoy learning from it. I (mostly) enjoy the writing process and am aiming to complete my next book for 2026.
