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Shell Chief Legal Officer

Shell Chief Legal Officer

Eide believes that the legal role has evolved to the point where CCs are now seen more as a “risk partner” in business. “CCs have always been involved in legal risks, but broader risks are becoming more and more important to our boards,” he says. “At the executive level, it is increasingly important to assess business risks rather than just look at legal risks. Legal skills are always important, but it depends on the level you are at in a legal department. It is more important for senior legal executives and CCs themselves to be able to assess legal risk against operational risk. Donny Ching: We launched our legal department in 2018 to reduce costs, increase efficiency and consolidate services. Today, our team of project managers, pricing specialists, data analysts, technologists and digital design specialists work at two Shell offshore service centres in Malaysia and Poland. The service centres are also home to our team of legal advisors, consisting of junior lawyers and paralegals, who are currently focused on standardized, low-risk work. Our Chief Legal Officer, Barry Tyndall, leads the team, reports to me and is a member of my legal leadership team.

Working with external consultant Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer to secure final approvals for the deal last month, Eide said: “I was very lucky. I had overall responsibility for the legal aspect and supervised all work processes. This has been a major goal for BG and the legal team in particular over the past year. I`ve only been here for a year, but there have been a lot of changes in the legal team and the group during that time. It is a very complicated question. The results of this experiment have led us to think about how we can make all our contracts understandable to the parties who will execute them. Many treaties are written in legal language with lengthy hypothetical clauses that most signatories to the agreements find difficult to understand; They only sign because each party trusts its lawyers. We want to return to the original purpose of a treaty: a meeting of minds. One of the ways legal plays a key role in influencing D&I strategy and execution is our annual Shell People Survey, where we track people based on 52 questions and skills. In 2016, employee usage for the company-wide survey was 80%. There are about six issues that focus on D&I, and Shell Legal generally scores well in this area. It is an example to others in the company of what is possible, and we share our best practices.

Donny Ching: The Legal Practice Advisory Team allows us to aggregate work in our service centers that does not require a lawyer in a particular onshore jurisdiction. Consolidating this work will help us train “the right people” and work more efficiently. We started with lawyers in our service centres who take on some standardized, low-risk work and are now expanding their skills and knowledge to handle more complex tasks. Royal Dutch Shell has announced further changes to its legal leadership team, including the appointment of a new General Counsel for the downstream sector. Rose Golds: Why is the legal advisory team part of the legal operations function? “I would say I`m still a lawyer, but my job is very different from that of a technical lawyer who drafts contracts. What I do has implications for more technical lawyers who need to see the impact of bigger issues – how it shapes negotiations or contracts, etc. I translate business risks into legal risks and communicate them to the lawyers on the team, and we translate what they do into business risks for the benefit of the board. The legal team has also been restructured internally, with Eide now reporting to Shell`s General Counsel, Donny Ching, and part of the upstream business leadership team. These changes follow a restructuring of the firm`s top legal team earlier this year. Eide says its 85-person BG legal team, spread across multiple locations, including London, Reading, Houston, Rio and Brisbane, is now focused on preparing for the potential risks the new company will face. “The most obvious is the drop in oil prices, which means there is more emphasis on credit risk.

Right now, there is also a greater focus on fraud risk, and I`m making sure the legal team takes the lead. This is the kind of risk area where the skills of in-house counsel can really contribute greatly to the strength of the group – robust fraud screening is rarely implemented in legal teams. The transformation was driven by Ching and his ability to enable his legal operations team to fully maximize the value it brings to the legal department and therefore to the business as a whole. In our final interview, Ching discusses the approach he has taken and provides examples that demonstrate the benefits of expanding the role of legal operations. Over the past decade, Eide has become a household name in the industry after holding influential internal positions at Statoil, where he worked with Helge Lund, managing director of BG Group, and Norwegian aluminium producer Sapa Group, before joining BG in 2015. Donny Ching is the visionary head of Shell`s global legal department, which includes a total of 1,000 professionals in 45 countries. Under Ching, Shell`s legal department has evolved from a responsive, labour-intensive and lawyer-centric model that simply offered legal advice to a proactive, data-driven, technology-driven and multidisciplinary talent model that offers a range of valuable business solutions. Royal Dutch Shell has appointed a new Group Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer and a General Counsel responsible for compliance.

And referring to Shell`s Ching and BP`s Rupert Bondy as a legal leader he admires, Eide says he sees reputation management as a critical role that has fallen into the hands of legal teams. It`s a timely transition for someone like Eide who, having risen through the corporate ladder relatively quickly, prefers to take on a business role rather than the usual legal work usually considered mandatory internally. Rose Ors: What was your goal in creating a legal operations unit and how is it organized? Rose Ors: What changes have changed the way you use data? He adds that the extent to which he plays the lawyer these days varies from day to day on a “sliding scale.” “I try to stay involved in more technical legal work so I don`t forget my skills, and I don`t want to be a pure generalist unrelated to the skills of a lawyer, but it`s true that at a higher level, you`re slowly moving away from the lawyer.” Commenting on his roles at BG and Statoil, Eide says: “The structure of the company is very different.

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