Lex Mundi’s latest annual General Counsel Summit addresses the topic of “GeoDisruption³: Balancing Gigawatts, Gigabytes and Gigapowers”: shedding light on the challenges, sanction risks, and geopolitical tensions that are making cross-border deals more uncertain and costly for senior in-house counsel at major multinationals.
The triple collision of geopolitics (Gigapowers), energy transition (Gigawatts), and artificial intelligence (Gigabytes)—or GeoDisruption³—are the forces reshaping global investment flows, regulatory landscapes, and legal risk. These accelerating dynamics are making cross-border deals more uncertain, more complex, and more costly for in-house counsel at major multinationals.
The latest 2025 Lex Mundi General Counsel Summit Report, titled “GeoDisruption³: Balancing Gigawatts, Gigabytes and Gigapowers” (‘The Report’), is based on insights from 50+ senior in-house counsel at blue-chip multinationals, gathered during the General Counsel Summit in Milan last October.
Cross-border transactions are no longer just about commercial logic—they now hinge on whether businesses can navigate the intersecting risks of geopolitics, AI regulation, and energy transition. Countries and regions are strategically repositioning to compete for economic opportunities, creating a fragmented and often conflicting regulatory environment. New restrictions on trade, foreign investment, and technology transfer are intersecting with sanctions and supply chain disclosure laws, forming a patchwork of regulatory barriers that law firms and in-house teams must now navigate in real time to keep deals viable.
At the heart of these challenges are three key areas of regulation that are having the most impact on cross-border transactions and operations:
- Sanctions are no longer just a compliance issue—they have become an active enforcement risk.
- Geo-economic risk is not just a hurdle to navigate—it can determine whether a deal even happens.
- General Counsel can help their companies embrace disruption by strengthening five areas of legal management—tactical negotiations, crisis responsiveness, risk-spotting and pre-diligence, AI, and agile legal project management.
Eric Staal, Vice President (Global Markets) at Lex Mundi:
Our work with General Counsel in the past year underscores the permanence of the disruption, with which they are grappling. Rather than dealing with episodic crises that have a definitive beginning and end, there is a trifecta of regulatory disruption driven by geopolitics, energy transition, and AI.
“The crucial shift is toward earlier legal assessments informed by local intelligence, in order to better navigate product launches and market entry, business relationships, operational strategies and capital allocation. Legal project management, in particular, is misunderstood as being about efficient deadline and cost management; its real value is in enabling smarter decisions to support strategy implementation.”
Helena Samaha, CEO and President of Lex Mundi:
“In this environment, business leaders have to steer their companies through extreme uncertainty and adjust their strategy as they go along. It is not just the volatility itself, it is the speed of swing within the volatility. This affects every aspect of their businesses, from the deal making which is reeling from the weight of sanctions, regulation and taxation, to managing an increasingly aggrieved and disillusioned workforce. *
“Front of line advisers to the boards are the in-house legal departments, who continue to report being very stretched. One silver lining may be innovation in technology and AI but legal teams still need structured, high-value, legal risk management support from their law firms. The Report outlines five possible solutions for in-house counsel: mastering complex negotiations, embedding proactive crisis management, integrating AI without losing strategic oversight, sharpening geopolitical risk assessment, and leveraging Legal Project Management to coordinate cross-border work effectively.
“The law firms that will thrive are the ones who bring not just expertise, but the right strategic mindset in helping businesses turn legal complexity into a competitive advantage."