Corporate counselors from a diverse array of industries gathered at Husch Blackwell in downtown St. Louis for Missouri Lawyers Media’s annual roundtable discussion.
The Corporate Counsel Roundtable was moderated by Husch Blackwell Managing Partner Bob Tomaso and was co-moderated by Husch partner Myers Dill.
The panelists were Chief Compliance Officer and General Counsel at Convergence Companies Carrie Wrisberg; Senior Vice President and Assistant General Counsel with HOK Eugene Tucker; VP & General Counsel of MFA Incorporated Stefan Knudsen; Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer for Lindenwood Education System Mark Falkowski; And Chief Legal Officer of Copeland Christine Carney.
Among the industries represented by these panelists were agriculture, manufacturing, higher education and cybersecurity.
The first question Tomaso posed to the panelists was: What are the major legal issues that face your industry?
Wrisburg said the ever-changing regulatory landscape her industry has to navigate.
“What we focus on is (…) they’ll give us a broad regulation and it’s, ‘how do we put a process behind it to implement it?’ So sometimes that can be a lot trickier than just saying, ‘Oh gosh. Regulation says that, well, how do we put that into place?’ So that’s a focus,” she said.
Carney pointed to tariffs as a particularly timely challenge for her industry.
“It’s really just trying to think ahead. How do we guess what’s going to happen next? Which is currently impossible, I’ve decided,” she said. “So, we’re scenario planning and trying to understand how we’re going to mitigate risk how we’re going to make up price, how we’re going to push price, how we’re going to (…) get sourcing shifted. So, this past six months has given all of us a little extra gray hair.”
She joked that the one positive is that these challenges provide a little extra job security for the legal industry.
The other three panelists agreed with the demands of navigating a changing regulatory field as well as tariffs and added that they also navigate on a daily basis the difference in employment laws in various states.
Dill asked panelists whether they were familiar with the industries they are representing before taking on their roles as attorneys.
“Intentionally believe in higher ed, like many people here, would not be where I am, but for higher ed, so it was an industry I sought out and I wanted to be a part of,” Falkowski said. “That’s what brought me to this great law firm where there’s a higher ed specific group and so it’s very much deliberate to end up in that industry. And in a way, I feel like I make a difference (…) helping schools achieve their goals.”
Tucker, who graduated law school in 2009, said he fell into the construction industry as a way to pay the bills during the recession.
Dill asked how lawyers and law firms can still add value to their clients and industries in a world where AI is becoming more prevalent.
Carney said AI can’t be ignored, but how it is implemented by and introduce to attorneys matters. She cited a recent example in her own company of how an AI governance policy where despite the governance framework, AI was still being used in an unauthorized manner.
“The use cases that I’ve experienced are incredibly powerful and certainly have saved us a ton of money this year and made our writing better,” Carney said. “But I think any idea that a governance framework or a policy will solve it is not true. It’s more teaching people how to think than kind of writing policy around it.”