Upheaval is far from over. Uncertainty remains about the persistence of the international health and economic crisis. In-house legal teams will have important contributions to make, particularly in helping organisations to adapt safely to new conditions.

Businesses are working to urgent imperatives. Market conditions are changing quickly and businesses are making commercial decisions faster than usual, seizing a new opportunity swiftly, in recognition that it might be a long wait for the next one.

An in-house legal team dealing with such a scenario will be working to find the right balance: on the one hand enabling and not impeding, opportunities that may be fleeting; on the other: ensuring that the business identifies and manages the risks such an opportunity may carry, often under tight timeframes.

In this new environment a number of vulnerabilities have come into sharper focus, in particular, supply chains; information technology; and social and environmental obligations.

Out of lockdown, many organisations have been accelerating existing plans to streamline workflows and ensure their in-house teams are prioritising the issues that really matter to the business rather than allowing the business-as-usual grind work to take them away from strategic projects. Organisations will be looking to their in-house legal team to be agile. They will be looking to them to adapt their usual internal approval or delegation of authority processes to meet the business needs in this new dynamic.

We explore the challenges, some strategies to deal with them, and our New Dynamic toolkit here.