An interview with Fiona Robertson, General Counsel at OSN in UAE.
What are the biggest external forces or trends currently shaping your role as General Counsel and how are you responding to them?
We’re seeing regulatory complexity increase across nearly every jurisdiction in MENA and this places extra demands on internal resources – lawyers need to be ahead of the game in every sense of the word. But overseeing compliance is not enough; we need to show our worth to the business in other ways. We have aimed to reframe legal as a knowledge hub, encouraging people to come to the team early and often. This means we are not just managing compliance, but anticipating consequences for other commercial relationships, working on maximising growth and assisting with future planning. The team must constantly build relationships outside the legal silo.
How are you balancing the increasing demands of legal risk management with the expectation to drive business value and strategic insight?
The assumption in the question is that the two concepts are conflicting, but this is just not the case. Historically, the legal department was viewed as a blocker to business innovation and growth, but these days are long gone. Today, the real challenge lies in identifying which risks are significant and which are merely background noise. This requires an understanding of context, commercial acumen, and an ability to *really* assess materiality. My approach has been to develop a legal function that can raise critical red flags when necessary, but also understands how to find a pathway to ‘yes’.
What’s one lesson or insight from your in-house journey that you wish you’d known earlier and would share with a fellow GC today?
Perfectly crafted lengthy legal answers are neither helpful nor necessary. And no one reads them properly anyway. What matters is judgment, timing, and credibility. The initial answer to the commercial team needs to arrive quickly in both verbal and written form, then legal needs to follow up regularly to see if the team needs more (they always do). Legal needs to be a natural part of the transaction team, not a side dish. To get to that status, you need to be helpful, you need to be bold, and you need to be reliable. Every single time.
