Most recently general counsel and compliance director at digital and data-led specialty insurance business Ki, Jo Nayler has led the legal teams at multiple international financial services and insurance businesses. Those have included roles as chief legal and governance officer at IG Group and group GC at Just Group, as well as leading other teams such as compliance, company secretarial/governance, ESG and internal audit in large organisations, including several listed FTSE250s, a large American insurer and a PE-backed group.
She has led M&A and subsequent integrations, has extensive regulatory experience and has led teams through transformation and change. Global Legal Post spoke with Jo about her career, how the GC role has evolved over time and how AI will continue to impact the role of in-house counsel in the future.
Your career has seen you run the legal departments across a number of financial services and insurance businesses – how have you seen the role of the GC evolve over that time?
The role has really broadened over time; it’s become increasingly strategic and increasingly commercial, and also extended to the GC taking on responsibility for other departments and other teams as well, not just legal. In my first GC role, 99% of the time it was really focused on the technical, legal side of things. It did change over the course of my role, shifting into areas that were adjacent to legal such as regulatory issues, compliance and corporate development. So while it did get broader, in that particular instance it was challenging to turn the GC role into a truly enterprise-wide one. The GC roles that I’ve had since then have been broader and included leading other functions as well as legal, have been on the executive team and reported directly to the CEO. Once you start leading those different teams, you gain a greater understanding of the business, because you’re looking at different parts of it through different lenses. When you add all of that experience together, you’re seeing across pretty much the whole organisation. As a result, you know what the issues are and what the contribution is that you can make to help to resolve them.
Can you tell us a little about your most recent role at Ki Insurance?
I started at Ki in March 2024 and when I came in, there were a couple of key priorities. The first was the legal and operational separation of Ki from its parent company and the second was setting up the legal, company secretarial and compliance functions as part of that separation. Rather than being a department of a bigger organisation, it made much more sense for Ki to be fully independent and have its own dedicated teams, so that it was able to pursue its own strategy. My team was a critical part of the team at Ki working on the separation, and we ended up being nominated and commended at the Lawyer Awards for In-House Team of the Year in Banking and Financial Services. It was the first time that I’ve had the opportunity to build teams from scratch, as well as being a very interesting corporate separation to work on. All in all a great role.
What are the key legal issues impacting in-house insurance lawyers at the moment?
The challenge for everybody working in the insurance sector at the moment is the soft market and the change in dynamic and commercial pressure that this leads to. For lawyers operating in the wholesale insurance space this means that you’ve got to be really careful reviewing policy wordings, because there can easily be an increase in coverage that can slip in, or exclusions that you thought you had being not quite as effective as they used to be. So it’s really just keeping a very close eye on that.
The soft market also leads to a need for cost control across all teams and a requirement to do more with less. That has really been amplified by the advent of and developments in AI, which add to the expectation that everyone will be able to do much more with fewer people. I’m a big advocate of AI and an early adopter, but at the same time there are of course risks that go with it, so it has to be done in quite a careful way so that those risks are properly understood and properly mitigated and managed. GCs need to be focused on making sure that the right governance is in place across the organisation for the use of AI, both within their own teams and more generally.
How do you see the advance of AI impacting in-house legal departments and the GC role more broadly?
It has definitely already made a big difference, even something as straightforward as using Copilot; when you need to track down an email or a paper that you wrote at a particular point in time, it’s a huge timesaver. At the same time, it’s a very rapidly developing space, and not all AI is the same in terms of either its functionality or, critically, how secure it is. It’s also only going to be as good as you train it to be; if you’re not giving it access to the right information or you’re not using the right prompts, then you’re not going to get good outputs. So there’s a balance at the moment between accepting that, to some degree, we’re trialling something which is quite new and there will be things that go wrong – and of course trying to minimise those – and embracing it rather than shying away from it. I do think there is probably going to be less need for junior lawyers in teams in the future and there are big questions with no real answers at the moment about how those lawyers are going to learn and how they will then have the skills to go on to become more senior lawyers.
If you could give one piece of advice to junior in-house counsel who want to progress to a leadership role, what would that be?
It’s really key to focus on relationship building as one of those areas where they can beat AI. Then think about the other skills that AI is not going to have – so it could be advocacy, negotiation, building client trust, strategic thinking, emotional intelligence. Finally, make sure that you get as much experience as possible with as many different types of AI as you can, so that you’re really good at using it to help you to get things done quickly and accurately and demonstrate your ability to do that.
You started your career in private practice – what originally made you want to work in-house and have you ever considered going back to private practice?
I started out as a litigator in the insurance and reinsurance world, but it got to a point where there was less and less of that contentious work, so I pivoted to more commercial and regulatory work. I felt in that space that it was a bit frustrating being in private practice, because you couldn’t always see the results of the work that you’d done – had the advice you gave helped the situation or not? I wanted to be able to see the bigger picture and see the difference that hopefully I was making. That’s why I very much enjoy being in house and can’t really imagine going back to private practice.
What was the last book you read and what are you reading now and why?
I like detective stories. The last one I read was ‘A Study in Scarlet’ by Arthur Conan Doyle. The reason I read it was because my twin boys had it on their list from school of things to read over the summer. I had never read any Arthur Conan Doyle and really enjoyed it. The book brings into play the question of whether something can be morally right even when it’s legally wrong. So it had some interesting questions in it, but mainly for me reading is about escapism. I’m currently re-reading another detective book: ‘The Cuckoo’s Calling’. It’s one of the Cormoran Strike books by Robert Galbraith (JK Rowling). I just find those books very absorbing. You can get lost in them and switch off from daily life for a while.
Jo Nayler is currently on garden leave from Ki.
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