Profile – Vroukje van Oosten Slingeland, General Counsel, ING

Vroukje van Oosten Slingeland has worked for global financial institution ING, based in the Netherlands, for almost 15 years. She tells In-house Perspective about legal innovation at ING, reacting to the Covid-19 pandemic and remote working, and what her vision of the lawyer of the future looks like.

Vroukje van Oosten Slingeland began at ING as its Head of Legal Ops & IT Banking in 2005, became the General Counsel in the Netherlands in 2016 and finally the global General Counsel in July 2019. She tells In-House Perspective ‘if you’d asked me in the beginning, “are you going to be the general counsel here someday?” I would have laughed’.

But, she says, her path to legal leadership at ING has been ‘logical and organic’, ‘because ING is a very big company, with many different parts and disciplines, so there’s a lot you can learn inside the company’.

Van Oosten Slingeland started her career in private practice, where she spent six years as an attorney-at-law at Kennedy Van der Laan, a pioneer firm in the field of IT law field in the Netherlands. Having specialised in IT law during her studies, van Oosten Slingeland enjoyed working in this environment. But she started to realise that ‘it’s just one side of the picture – you’re always external, no matter what you do to connect with your clients’ in private practice.

She had a sense that life in-house – ‘on the other side’, as she puts it – would be different and might appeal to a wider range of her skills than she was using. So she made the move in-house to ING, starting within her specialism, but quickly learning and evolving her practice through broader work until she reached the top last year.

Her work is now very diverse and part of her agenda ‘is always a surprise’, dictated by external factors like challenges within the teams, media attention, politics and regulatory influences. Van Oosten Slingeland says she has a full agenda, ‘so you would expect that I know what I’m going to do on a regular day, but four out of five days my agenda ends up being quite different to how it looked in the morning, which I enjoy’.

Working in a crisis

Covid-19 is perhaps the ultimate agenda shake-up, changing the way we work and affecting every aspect of society – including the world’s economy. Van Oosten Slingeland worked at ING in a very different capacity during the 2008/9 financial crisis, and, looking back, she says the world was not prepared. Now, she says it’s helpful that regulatory measures have been brought in to help mitigate the damage another surprise could cause.

‘That still doesn’t mean that that we’re not affected by this,’ she adds. ‘If your customers are affected, and if society is affected, so are we. But I think it’s easier, from a legal perspective, to sit in the eye of the storm and look at what’s going on around you, and have the peace of mind to really closely observe what is needed to be done and choose your priorities. I think we’re in much better shape to do that today than in the first round, because we’ve learned.’

And that’s her advice to other general counsel – especially in financial institutions – working through these challenging times: ‘sit back, observe very carefully. Don’t forget to breathe. And try to think in a structured way’.

She advises other counsel to always look for help. ‘Don’t try to fix it alone,’ she says. ‘Help could be outside counsel advising you on certain topics, but help could also be someone in another function, helping you with understanding what’s going on.’

‘I get a lot of help from people around me,’ explains van Oosten Slingeland. ‘In order to stay cool and calm and know what you need to do, you need a lot of perspective that you don’t have by yourself’.

At ING, the legal teams have worked from home since mid-March but have tried to stay connected. Van Oosten Slingeland says the initial expectation was that home-working would only be for a couple of weeks. And the first of what turned out to be many more weeks were even busier than usual, with crisis management and urgent questions around the impact of Covid-19 on her agenda.

But still, on the very first day, she recognised her own sense of isolation and had an awareness that many of her colleagues would be feeling the same way.

‘I felt the need to reach out to our legal troops’, she says, ‘so I spontaneously created a little vlog of my home-working environment and challenged other team members to do the same’. Although she perhaps wouldn’t normally have shared a private environment, which she notes she didn’t even tidy before filming, ‘it was a great way to connect and send a message explaining how I felt and hoping everybody was well’.

Her colleagues engaged very positively with her effort to connect, stepping up to the challenge. The Asia team created a fully edited video of their whole team, with music too, and 15-20 teams have now completed the challenge. With 550 people working in ING’s legal departments globally, many were able to see each other for the first time.

That’s been the positive outcome of this disruptive environment. Although returning to the company’s head office in Amsterdam very recently has highlighted how much she’d missed invaluable informal contact with her colleagues, van Oosten Slingeland says ‘as soon as we started working from home the boundaries of distance broke down’, enabling a ‘closer connection with the global population, which has brought improvements in collaboration and connection over the past couple of months’.

Agile working

The rollercoaster of 2020 would have been impossible to predict or prepare for. But working practices geared towards adaptability, flexibility and collaboration might lend themselves to easier adjustment.

ING as a whole has embraced an ‘agile way of working’. van Oosten Slingeland explains that the core principles of this are priority setting, to ensure you balance resources and capabilities to achieve your goals in the best way. Secondly, it’s purpose-driven, with everybody working in an agile environment beginning by asking ‘why am I doing this, what do I want to achieve?’

Crucially, it’s a multidisciplinary team working together that asks that question. ‘There’s team empowerment and responsibility, end-to-end, for the result of what they’re going to produce’, says van Oosten Slingeland.

Initially, this didn’t seem to van Oosten Slingeland like an initiative for lawyers. She notes, ‘as a legal team, we don’t produce anything. But we have a workload to manage’. She found ‘it’s just a matter of using your imagination and being creative and thinking. Within the legal function there are different disciplines or specialisms and if you put them together, they can be a stronger team’.

She adds, ‘More than anything else you need to change the culture of a team from individuals and silos working on their own areas into a sharing environment, where people are transparent about what they do. And about what they struggle with, and they need to dare to ask for help.’

These practices, she says, were helpful going into the pandemic, because ‘the company as a whole is familiar with the agile way of working, and as such, understands priority setting and purpose’.

This makes it much easier to manage people from a distance. ‘I've never looked at how long someone is behind their desk, I've always looked at what they deliver,’ she says. ‘So that output-driven management style, which comes from the agile way of working, and my experience, definitely helps in managing the troops from a distance’.

The future lawyer

Van Oosten Slingeland uses the term ‘the troops’ to describe her legal teams out of fondness. ‘There's a large population that I'm very fond of and I feel sometimes like their captain, if you will, steering through rough waters’, she explains.

In that capacity, she feels a responsibility to set an example for all the lawyers when it comes to work-life balance. ‘I have to show the behaviour that I think is reasonable,’ she says. ‘And I wouldn't want people reporting to me to work all day, all night or weekend, so I need to make it clear that I don’t expect them to do that, including by showing them that I can relax and have a time off as well’.

She also is aware of her position as a role model, particularly as a woman, and of her power to increase diversity. ‘I see it as my obligation to look into the legal function but maybe also outside, and see if there’s talent that I can cherish and keep and help grow. And that’s what I’m going to do – I have the power to do that and to make sure that my team is encouraged to do that. And that’s very important, because if you don’t start with the pipeline, it’s never going to happen’.

In October 2018, ING’s legal function (or ‘tribe’, as per the agile way of working) won the Strategy and changing behaviours category at the Financial Times’s Innovative Lawyers awards. At the time, van Oosten Slingeland said ‘I am so proud to see how Tribe Legal explores new frontiers on our expedition into an unknown future. This award encourages us to keep exploring’.

That frontier, she tells In-House Perspective, is that of the ‘future lawyer’, drawing on the principles of agile working and innovation. She says, ‘we have a large population that needs to work in an ever-changing environment. So we started to think about what type of lawyer we need to cope with that’.

She draws on the idea of the ‘vuca’ world – an acronym for volatile, uncertain, chaotic and ambiguous. In the face of such a situation, she says, ‘you could start thinking that it’s too much to bear, or you could think OK, that’s the reality. It’s a big storm, so what do we need to do to be prepared?’

Van Oosten Slingeland’s ‘future lawyer’ needs to have at least an affinity for technological solutions, able to use those tools to their benefit, and have a data-driven mind to understand how you can use data to analyse and predict changes.

In fact, her team have already embraced technology. They’re not just using it but developing it. ING’s lawyers, in collaboration with their colleagues in other departments, develop their own software tools to search for regulatory changes, for example.

‘ING as a company uses data to drive process and to predict what’s going to happen,’ she explains. ‘And it’s an interesting notion to take that to the legal function and ask, can we use technology to predict what’s going to happen in the world that’s relevant to our work, to make sure we can mitigate and manage risks in that way’.

She highlights the use of artificial intelligence for due diligence on documentation in a portfolio, or document generators for contracting. And ING’s Turkish team have built a portal, through which all requests for the legal team go. The system ensures ‘everybody involved – stakeholders, customers, and the legal team – can track and trace what’s going on with the question’.

It also means the team have ‘a very rich variety of data’, thanks to this bank of questions asked, ‘which gives you a lot of feedback about what’s going on and what your attention points should be, because if you get a lot of questions on one thing it might mean that there’s a need to mitigate a risk or change something in the way the business operates’. That portal system is now being rolled out to other teams, including the Dutch team in the head office.

Many of these new tech-based solutions are the results of ‘legal innovation boot camps’ at ING. Teams throughout the legal function are invited to submit ideas on innovation initiatives, going through rounds of selection until they reach the top three. They’re then asked to present their ideas before a jury comprised of the likes of van Oosten Slingeland, the head of the innovations department, and board members. The winner’s idea becomes reality. Van Oosten Slingeland says the boot camp brings the global teams together in a ‘very inspiring and enriching’ environment.

It’s not all about the tech. Key to van Oosten Slingeland’s ‘future lawyer’ concept is also the ability to be flexible and collaborate. She doesn’t want her lawyers to be too specialised. ‘I need people who are capable and willing to have flexibility to do data privacy one day, then lending for businesses the next, for example, and that’s important because it creates a flexibility of mind and a broader legal experience,’ she says.

‘You can be very highly specialised in a certain topic but it might be irrelevant a couple of years from now – we simply don’t know, and we embrace that notion’, she adds.

Working in and across different fields in ING on her journey to General Counsel has been very beneficial to van Oosten Slingeland, and she encourages her teams to take that approach. ‘Every piece of that helps me look at legal questions today in a different way. And in a better way. So that’s also what I want to create in order to make sure that people are flexible enough to deal with new things’.

With ING, she says, ‘the sky’s the limit when it comes to learning from other people. There’s a lot of opportunity in using tools and processes and knowledge from other people to do your job in a different way’.