Prisca Lo

The change was quite cathartic. I’d spent much of my career in Big Law. Even in private practice my skills were quite diverse, but compared to where I am now, they were very niche: banking and finance, and structured finance in particular. In private practice, one is typically very specialised.

Then I took a career break for quite a number of years. It gave me space to rethink whether I wanted to stay on the same career path. When I moved to a niche firm that was very active in the startup ecosystem, it was quite an eye-opener, and it paved the way for me to eventually go in-house and build a function from scratch.

Saison is actually my first in-house job. I never thought I would be part of the in-house community. That transition meant opening myself up to the idea that it was possible – even at the level of a partner in private practice. It does mean a bit of give and take. But being curious enough to make that move is what has led me to where I am today.

I think that nowadays, particularly with AI, people should not be confined or defined by what they’re doing. It really comes down to character: whether you’re the kind of person who is curious enough to do something different. That curiosity and willingness to try something new makes a real difference.

Character does play a big part. Even then, I was pushing myself – I made a point of representing both borrowers and lenders, working on complex financing structures that our firm was not familiar with, and working closely with the Corporate Finance department on different types of deals. I’d be the first to put my hand up and say: “I don’t know anything about this, but I’m happy to get stuck in.”

Looking at private practice today, I think lawyers have a lot more opportunities and are encouraged to develop other skillsets such as business development and leadership.

The same is true for in-house teams, whether you’re in a big bank, where roles tend to be more specialised, or in a smaller organisation like ours, where we have to take on multiple tasks. The opportunities are there.

Transitioning in-house is never easy. One of my interview questions is: “Why do you want to go in-house?” Candidates always give me the standard answer: “Because I want to be closer to the business.” So I’d ask: “What does that mean to you? What does being closer to the business actually mean?” Very few can answer that credibly.

To address your question more directly: coming from private practice, you have the core skills. Your technical skills – review, drafting, negotiation and all the other legal work – and your communication skills are very important. But beyond that, do you have the potential to develop key corporate skills?

Being close to the business isn’t simply about knowing what it does. People tend to focus on the core business activities, forgetting that every business line is part of a larger corporate organisation, requiring support in finance, HR, branding, communications and corporate development. You need to understand how those functions interact, how decisions are made, and what matters to the stakeholders involved.

Helping lawyers transfer their private practice skills into a corporate environment isn’t straightforward. Some people seem naturally curious and adaptable. I can guide them, and they learn through working closely with the business, but it isn’t something you can teach entirely from a manual.

And it matters, because in-house, you’re not simply identifying legal issues or leaving commercial points for the business to resolve. You’re expected to form a judgment and make a recommendation, taking commercial and strategic considerations into account. Management may ultimately decide differently, but you need to be prepared to give a view.

I think people really need to rethink their recruitment strategy, and I don’t see much of that in the conversations at the moment. I get invited to a lot of events, and it’s all about AI: legal AI governance, ways of working, the systemic issues. But I hear much less discussion about what AI means for talent retention, recruitment and in-house training. For me, that’s the most important part.

Because of how our business works, and because of my own career transition, I very deliberately built a team with diverse skills from day one, and I’ve never gone down the typical recruitment route.

Early on, I introduced a written assessment after initial HR screening. I needed to understand candidates’ technical foundations and how they communicated their reasoning before going into a more detailed interview. I often say that those foundation skills might account for 30% of what someone ultimately needs to succeed in-house. The other 70% has to be developed: understanding the business, working with different teams, making strategic judgments and learning to operate within the organisation.

We have worked hard to make Legal a genuinely embedded business partner. I don’t just mean a working relationship; I mean real embedment and trust, and it takes time to build.

I tailor [our written] assessment for each candidate, and I rarely test them on their bread and butter. I might test them a little to make sure they know their day-to-day work, but out of three assessments, only one will be familiar. The other two will be things they haven’t done before. I’m interested in how they approach something unfamiliar – whether they can identify the issues, apply their existing knowledge and communicate a sensible recommendation.

We ask candidates not to use AI for the assessment because I’m trying to understand their own reasoning and capability. We make the rules on AI use very clear in the beginning.

I also tell candidates that even if they could fool me, it won’t help them, because this is how I assess people, through their strengths and weaknesses. A weaker performance on the written assessment doesn’t always rule someone out. I want to understand how they approach unfamiliar problems and which skills can be developed, so that, if I hire them, I know how to support their growth. It’s a very honest exchange.

I was thinking about this recently. I used to hire people for their technical talent. In hindsight, that’s one factor, but now I look more widely at what someone brings to the table overall.

Across our global team, I’ve found that the most effective colleagues aren’t necessarily those with the deepest technical expertise. They’re the ones who combine sound legal skills with initiative, adaptability and the ability to work with people across different functions and jurisdictions. They’re self-starters, rather than people who need a fair amount of handholding.

Leadership is also very important, and not everyone has it. I’m not saying that without leadership skills you don’t belong in-house – there are always many layers. But it’s about having the foresight to look beyond “this is a talent I should have”, and think about how someone fits into the organisation and what role they’ll play in the future.

When you recruit, you’re not just filling a role for today. Our medium and long term business plans feature here: they help us anticipate what the organisation will need and what the legal function should be capable of delivering several years from now.

As I said, our business verticals are so diversified that my playbook has always differed slightly from the industry standard – if there is one. I look beyond what the lawyers themselves can do, to how the function will work with the rest of the organisation.

The operating model has to be driven by the business. There’s no point building a function that the business doesn’t need or isn’t ready to support. But today, we have far more options for meeting those needs, whether through internal lawyers, external counsel, secondees, fractional support or technology.

Recently, I advised a team setting up a brand new business vertical, and I wrote them a guide. The starting point was not “Should we hire or instruct external counsel?” … It was “What capabilities will this new business need, and when?” There are many ways to meet those needs.

I have a set of questions to work through with the business leader before I offer a solution. There is no single standard answer. The right model depends on the business, its stage of development and what it needs to reach its goals.

I find it hard to see AI replacing the full role of an experienced GC in the foreseeable future. Of course, the technology is changing quickly, so I wouldn’t make a prediction about 20 or 30 years from now. But in the next five or seven years, I can’t see that role being replaced.

We work with different legal AI tools, [but] they can’t bring the human context built through experiences – knowing the organisation, its people, the history of a decision and what may not be said explicitly. AI can support technical analysis, but it would still be working to their instructions and parameters. It cannot yet take responsibility for a recommendation or a relationship.

I always emphasise communication and leadership skills. Even as AI becomes better at strategic analysis, so much of an executive discussion is still contextual. If one thing changes in the boardroom, I need to pivot entirely while people fire questions at me from different angles. AI might answer faster than me, but is the answer what your stakeholders are looking for? Maybe not.

I joked that I might not do a law degree at all – I would study something I have passion for at university, like history of art. Not because law isn’t worthwhile, but because I think having interests beyond law is good for the soul.

More seriously, I think psychology and communication skills will be very important, so I’d probably choose a degree that would give me exposure to human psychology. As AI advances, understanding human psychology and communication will remain valuable, because people are shaped by very different cultures, experiences and circumstances.

And it’s not just about what you learn at university or during your training contract. When you go to an event, watch a film or go to the theatre, does anything inspire you and develop your humanity, your communication, your leadership and your entrepreneurial skills? These are things that can’t be taught at law school.

I think you have to learn to build. I’m not saying you need to be able to build a business from scratch, but understanding how it’s done and what it takes is important. I do worry about whether we are creating enough opportunities for the next generation to develop resilience. It comes from having to adapt, solve problems and work through unfamiliar situations.

Now that knowledge is much more widely available, I hope the people who tend to be overlooked will have a better chance of finding a niche where they’re recognised. What that niche is depends on their circumstances – where they are and what they’re doing.

But I hope everyone will be recognised for what they bring to the table, and that it’s looked at more widely than the traditional set: can you build a book of business? Do you represent the firm? Are you being nominated for one of the many awards?

Definitely. I think lawyers who are curious, adaptable and willing to gain experience beyond their specialisation will be increasingly valuable, particularly in-house, because we have people with many different professional backgrounds under one roof. You need different layers and people with different offerings.

Being a strong business partner isn’t limited to supporting revenue-generating activities. Governance and function development matter too. And not everyone needs to play the same role. Some lawyers are at their best when they’re working through difficult technical issues or providing the depth of expertise that the organisation depends on, whilst others excel at keeping things moving, coordinating across teams and making sure nothing falls through the cracks.

I think the in-house community will grow. Law firms have traditionally played a major role in training young talent, and many lawyers later bring that experience in-house. But private practice alone can only help so much, we need greater dialogue and collaboration between private practice and in-house teams on talent development, especially when AI changes how lawyers work and gain experiences.

The change was quite cathartic. I’d spent much of my career in Big Law. Even in private practice my skills were quite diverse, but compared to where I am now, they were very niche: banking and finance, and structured finance in particular. In private practice, one is typically very specialised.

Then I took a career break for quite a number of years. It gave me space to rethink whether I wanted to stay on the same career path. When I moved to a niche firm that was very active in the startup ecosystem, it was quite an eye-opener, and it paved the way for me to eventually go in-house and build a function from scratch.

Saison is actually my first in-house job. I never thought I would be part of the in-house community. That transition meant opening myself up to the idea that it was possible – even at the level of a partner in private practice. It does mean a bit of give and take. But being curious enough to make that move is what has led me to where I am today.

Definitely. Private practice is quite rewarding, so giving all that up to join a niche local firm is quite a big jump. The break helped enormously in getting me across that line.

I think that nowadays, particularly with AI, people should not be confined or defined by what they’re doing. It really comes down to character: whether you’re the kind of person who is curious enough to do something different. That curiosity and willingness to try something new makes a real difference.

Character does play a big part. Thinking back to the private practice days, my work was focused on the traditional role of an external specialist lawyer. Even then, I was pushing myself – I made a point of representing both borrowers and lenders, working on complex financing structures that our firm was not familiar with, and working closely with the Corporate Finance department on different types of deals. I’d be the first to put my hand up and say: “I don’t know anything about this, but I’m happy to get stuck in.”

Looking at private practice today, I think lawyers have a lot more opportunities and are encouraged to develop other skillsets such as business development and leadership. Organisations as a whole – not just law firms – are much more aware of the skills their people need to build for the organisation to succeed, and there’s been a lot of focus on that in recent years.

The same is true for in-house teams, whether you’re in a big bank, where roles tend to be more specialised, or in a smaller organisation like ours, where we have to take on multiple tasks. The opportunities are there. And with advances in technology, people seem much more willing to go into areas they’re not familiar with.

Transitioning in-house is never easy. One of my interview questions is: “Why do you want to go in-house?” Candidates always give me the standard answer: “Because I want to be closer to the business.” So I’d ask: “What does that mean to you? What does being closer to the business actually mean?” Very few can answer that credibly.

To address your question more directly: coming from private practice, you have the core skills. Your technical skills – review, drafting, negotiation and all the other legal work – and your communication skills are very important. But beyond that, do you have the potential to develop key corporate skills?

Those aren’t easy to define, but I’d say they’re about being able to work with different functions and different business lines. In a law firm, most people share a legal frame of reference, even though their roles are different. In a corporate organisation, you work with people from many different professional backgrounds and ways of thinking. You’ll work with accountants in finance, and with people from audit, brand and comms, and HR backgrounds. Knowing how to deal with them, and understanding them when they talk to you about their business objectives, is really important.

Being close to the business isn’t simply about knowing what it does. People tend to focus on the core business activities, forgetting that every business line is part of a larger corporate organisation, requiring support in finance, HR, branding, communications and corporate development. You need to understand how those functions interact, how decisions are made, and what matters to the stakeholders involved. I’ve seen private practice lawyers struggle with that transition, because it’s a very different environment from advising a client on a particular deal or legal issue.

Helping lawyers transfer their private practice skills into a corporate environment isn’t straightforward. Some people seem naturally curious and adaptable. I can guide them, and they learn through working closely with the business, but it isn’t something you can teach entirely from a manual.

And it matters, because in-house, you’re not simply identifying legal issues or leaving commercial points for the business to resolve. You’re expected to form a judgment and make a recommendation, taking commercial and strategic considerations into account. Management may ultimately decide differently, but you need to be prepared to give a view. That can be a difficult adjustment from private practice, where the final commercial decision usually sits with the client.

Yes, and I’ll give you an example. It can be as basic as keeping your calendar up to date, so your colleagues know when you’re available and can schedule meetings with you more easily.

It’s simple things like understanding that it’s not just about your team. Your team may know what you’re doing, and so may your direct report, but other people who depend on your work also need visibility. It’s about communicating beyond your immediate team. That’s another thing to bear in mind when you come into the corporate world.

I think people really need to rethink their recruitment strategy, and I don’t see much of that in the conversations at the moment. I get invited to a lot of events, and it’s all about AI: legal AI governance, ways of working, the systemic issues. But I hear much less discussion about what AI means for talent retention, recruitment and in-house training. For me, that’s the most important part.

I’m not claiming I had any vision. But our business has always been very diversified. We go from CVC to private credit to funds, and we do highly structured financing transactions and strategic alliances across multiple jurisdictions. So from the start, I could never adopt a single model – nor did I want to.

I was the first senior legal leader they recruited, and there was no blueprint for a global legal function. There were colleagues handling specific legal-related matters, but we had no established global leadership or operating model for the function.

Because of how our business works, and because of my own career transition, I very deliberately built a team with diverse skills from day one, and I’ve never gone down the typical recruitment route. If you remember, very few legal roles required a written assessment at the start of the process – if they had one at all. You might see that in finance, audit or even corporate development, but for legal it was almost unheard of.

Early on, I introduced a written assessment after initial HR screening. I needed to understand candidates’ technical foundations and how they communicated their reasoning before going into a more detailed interview. I often say that those foundation skills might account for 30% of what someone ultimately needs to succeed in-house. The other 70% has to be developed: understanding the business, working with different teams, making strategic judgments and learning to operate within the organisation.

Having spoken to a lot more legal recruiters, and worked across other legal teams, I think many in-house teams still seem to be built quite traditionally. People are recruited for a specific skill set, that’s their entire remit, and they sit in the legal department with very little interaction with the other parts of the organisation.

I’ve always made sure that everyone who joins is more than just a member of a legal team. We have worked hard to make Legal a genuinely embedded business partner. I know a lot of functions say that. But I don’t just mean a working relationship; I mean real embedment and trust, and it takes time to build.

Even with new subsidiaries, where we’ve been involved from the start, it can take me two years to develop a deep understanding of how they operate: not just legal, but how legal interacts with other functions, what the reporting lines should and shouldn’t be, how they use external counsel and what kind of panel we need. That kind of deep embedment is essential if you want a really effective legal function, especially now, with AI.

That’s right – but the assessment is only a baseline. It helps me see what someone can already do and where they may need to develop. And to be honest, once I’ve reviewed the written assessment, I can craft much more meaningful interview questions rather than just asking the standard ones.

I also tailor the assessment for each candidate, and I rarely test them on their bread and butter. I might test them a little to make sure they know their day-to-day work, but out of three assessments, only one will be familiar. The other two will be things they haven’t done before. I’m interested in how they approach something unfamiliar – whether they can identify the issues, apply their existing knowledge and communicate a sensible recommendation.

For example, I often ask candidates to give a PowerPoint presentation to the board. I give them a case study with some guidance and questions, and I’d say: “This is your material, but present it to me as if I’m one of the directors and have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re trying to convince me this is something I need to look at.”

No, it’s timed and they do it at home. I always tell candidates not to do it at the end of a work day – do it in the morning, or on the weekend. It takes quite a long time, usually about four hours, so they have to show some commitment.

We ask candidates not to use AI for the assessment because I’m trying to understand their own reasoning and capability. We make the rules on AI use very clear in the beginning.

I also tell candidates that even if they could fool me, it won’t help them, because this is how I assess people, through their strengths and weaknesses. A weaker performance on the written assessment doesn’t always rule someone out. I want to understand how they approach unfamiliar problems and which skills can be developed, so that, if I hire them, I know how to support their growth. It’s a very honest exchange.

I haven’t hired anyone I had doubts about after the written assessment. But I have hired people who I thought would be a good addition to the team, without expecting them to lead the pack, and they’ve turned out to be rising stars with real leadership potential.

It has also gone the other way. I’ve hired people who were strong on paper, but found the transition hard. Everything came down to market standard: “This is market. This is what we should expect.” Then my question to them would be: “I understand. But is that commercially viable? Or are you putting a lot of onus on the business team to negotiate a point that really doesn’t matter in the scheme of things?”

I was thinking about this recently. I used to hire people for their technical talent. I’d think: “Wow, they have the special skills we really need,” or “Their offering would fit the company very well.” In hindsight, that’s one factor, but now I look more widely at what someone brings to the table overall.

Across our global team, I’ve found that the most effective colleagues aren’t necessarily those with the deepest technical expertise. They’re the ones who combine sound legal skills with initiative, adaptability and the ability to work with people across different functions and jurisdictions. They’re self-starters, rather than people who need a fair amount of handholding.

Leadership is also very important, and not everyone has it. I’m not saying that without leadership skills you don’t belong in-house – there are always many layers. But it’s about having the foresight to look beyond “this is a talent I should have”, and think about how someone fits into the organisation and what role they’ll play in the future.

When you recruit, you’re not just filling a role for today. Our medium and long term business plans feature here: they help us anticipate what the organisation will need and what the legal function should be capable of delivering several years from now.

So, apart from really complicated matters, the team does day-to-day legal work, and I spend a lot of my time working with them on complex issues, management matters and designing the function – putting in place job architecture and competencies that people can work towards as they grow within the organisation, as well as in-house knowledge hub.

As I said, our business verticals are so diversified that my playbook has always differed slightly from the industry standard – if there is one. I look beyond what the lawyers themselves can do, to how the function will work with the rest of the organisation.

The operating model has to be driven by the business. There’s no point building a function that the business doesn’t need or isn’t ready to support. But today, we have far more options for meeting those needs, whether through internal lawyers, external counsel, secondees, fractional support or technology.

Recently, I advised a team setting up a brand new business vertical, and I wrote them a guide. The starting point was not “Should we hire or instruct external counsel?” … It was “What capabilities will this new business need, and when?” There are many ways to meet those needs.

One is a market specialist, a model I’ve used since joining the organisation. It’s part of our approach to market coverage: someone at international headquarters supports a developing local business until it has enough momentum to justify hiring in-house or increasing external legal spend.

But that’s not the only way. You can have legal secondees for a while, and perhaps add a fractional, more senior lawyer on top, as long as that person provides consistency. So there’s now a range of options.

In one instance, quite an entrepreneurial Indian firm came to see us. We explained what we wanted, and I said that ideally, at this stage, I’d want someone on secondment, because we’re just starting and there isn’t much volume yet. But law firm secondments are hugely expensive.

So we explored – and I’m not saying it’s gone anywhere – whether they had junior lawyers they wanted to train up who could be seconded to us at a reasonable cost, with a partner signing off all the work. In time, if it worked out, that lawyer could be fully seconded, we could agree a fractional arrangement, or we could simply hire them.

When someone asks me: “How should we do this?”, I don’t start by telling them what I know. My involvement in steering committees helps me understand the business. But before proposing a resourcing model, I still ask: what’s your plan for the next 12 months? The next three years? The next five? What’s your funding and budget? Where will the business be originated from?

I have a set of questions to work through with the business leader before I offer a solution. There is no single standard answer. The right model depends on the business, its stage of development and what it needs to reach its goals.

And now there’s an AI expectation in everything, so we also have to think about governance. If colleagues in a local market start using AI, what does that mean for information security, quality control and accountability across the organisation? How do we build the capabilities while making sure governance is wrapped around them?

I find it hard to see AI replacing the full role of an experienced GC in the foreseeable future. Of course, the technology is changing quickly, so I wouldn’t make a prediction about 20 or 30 years from now. But in the next five or seven years, I can’t see that role being replaced.

We work with different legal AI tools, and one thing they can’t do yet – though I’m sure they’ll catch up eventually – is the strategic angle. They can’t bring the human context built through experiences – knowing the organisation, its people, the history of a decision and what may not be said explicitly. AI can support technical analysis, but it would still be working to their instructions and parameters. It cannot yet take responsibility for a recommendation or a relationship.

I always emphasise communication and leadership skills. Even as AI becomes better at strategic analysis, so much of an executive discussion is still contextual. If one thing changes in the boardroom, I need to pivot entirely while people fire questions at me from different angles. AI might answer faster than me, but is the answer what your stakeholders are looking for? Maybe not.

So, not in the foreseeable future. But who knows? Technology is changing very quickly, every day.

I joked that I might not do a law degree at all – I would study something I have passion for at university, like history of art. Not because law isn’t worthwhile, but because I think having interests beyond law is good for the soul.

More seriously, I think psychology and communication skills will be very important, so I’d probably choose a degree that would give me exposure to human psychology. As AI advances, understanding human psychology and communication will remain valuable, because people are shaped by very different cultures, experiences and circumstances. AI is developing fast, but it may not be able to fully appreciate the nuances of different cultures, languages and human experiences, or draw on them to make holistic well-rounded decisions.

And it’s not just about what you learn at university or during your training contract. When you go on a skiing holiday, what do you learn? Is there something you can take back to work? When you go to an event, watch a film or go to the theatre, does anything inspire you and develop your humanity, your communication, your leadership and your entrepreneurial skills? These are things that can’t be taught at law school.

I’m not deterring anyone from doing law, by all means. But people need to think outside the law. One thing I think is very good for young lawyers, especially while they’re still studying, is to get involved in a young founders programme. There’s Young Founders School and other similar non-profit organisations. Go and learn how to build something.

I think you have to learn to build. I’m not saying you need to be able to build a business from scratch, but understanding how it’s done and what it takes is important. I do worry about whether we are creating enough opportunities for the next generation to develop resilience. It comes from having to adapt, solve problems and work through unfamiliar situations.

Big Law is getting bigger and bigger, but to be honest I’m not sure it’s necessarily the way to go. I wouldn’t discount local and niche firms. In Singapore, for example, they can compete for significant deals on the strength of their local knowledge.

But I wouldn’t go in-house too quickly. One concern about moving in-house very early is that the opportunities for structured training and exposure to different matters can be narrower, depending on the organisation. In a law firm you have many clients and you rotate through departments during training, so you’re much more exposed. A lot of people go in-house very early, and I think their skills suffer a little.

That’s an interesting question. Particularly in private practice, you tend to plateau if you can’t build a client book, aren’t seen as a rising star, or aren’t seen to represent the firm, because business development is so important. At the end of the day, if you can’t make partner, there’s only so long you can stay. So people without those achievements tend not to be rewarded, even though they may be equally talented.

Now that knowledge is much more widely available, I hope the people who tend to be overlooked will have a better chance of finding a niche where they’re recognised. What that niche is depends on their circumstances – where they are and what they’re doing.

But I hope everyone will be recognised for what they bring to the table, and that it’s looked at more widely than the traditional set: can you build a book of business? Do you represent the firm? Are you being nominated for one of the many awards?

I hope the next generation will think about how they can shine if they’re not naturally selected through those processes.

Definitely. I think lawyers who are curious, adaptable and willing to gain experience beyond their specialisation will be increasingly valuable, particularly in-house, because we have people with many different professional backgrounds under one roof. You need different layers and people with different offerings.

But in the in-house community, one thing we’re constantly trying to promote is that it’s not only about “Am I helping the business? Am I the best business partner?” That matters, of course. Being a strong business partner isn’t limited to supporting revenue-generating activities. Governance and function development matter too. And not everyone needs to play the same role. Some lawyers are at their best when they’re working through difficult technical issues or providing the depth of expertise that the organisation depends on, whilst others excel at keeping things moving, coordinating across teams and making sure nothing falls through the cracks.

To be honest, I think the in-house community will grow. Law firms have traditionally played a major role in training young talent, and many lawyers later bring that experience in-house. But private practice alone can only help so much, we need greater dialogue and collaboration between private practice and in-house teams on talent development, especially when AI changes how lawyers work and gain experiences.