The key is understanding what the business is trying to accomplish and helping them solution it
________________________________________________________________ Eben Krim | Solstice Advanced Materials
The in-house shift
Eben launched his career in private practice at Proskauer, focusing on labor and employment law before joining Honeywell in-house. Over the next 15 years, he worked across business units and corporate functions, primarily in labor and employment. When needed, he took on investigations and litigation matters as well.“ At Honeywell, most of the lawyers were quite specialized,” Eben recalls. That environment helped him deepen his expertise inside a global organization.
Moving to Solstice meant stepping away from that specialty.“ I moved from being primarily a labor and employment lawyer to being a global litigator,” Eben points out. Now, he oversees commercial disputes and collaborates with senior leadership, keeping the board informed on financial exposure issues.
Transitioning Solstice to an independent company took time. Eben spent months laying the groundwork for the legal functions that would run after the spin.“ I spent almost a year preparing for the spin and doing all the work in my areas to allow us to spin off into a standalone public company,” Eben remembers. That preparation now shapes how he builds systems that stand on their own.
The bigger picture
Solstice operates at the crossroads of product development and regulation. Its portfolio includes low global warming potential refrigerants and Spectra ® fiber, among other areas. Each product brings regulatory and compliance challenges, so legal joins the project from the start.“ Our low global warming refrigerant is the product for which the company is named. It is easy to feel good about selling many of these products, especially those that help customers lower their carbon footprint and improve energy efficiency without sacrificing performance,” Eben adds.
He points to Spectra ® fiber- used in helmets and body armor for military and law enforcement- as another example of real-world impact.“ We had a retired Navy SEAL come and speak to us about how our products help keep him and his colleagues safe,” Eben shares. That connection, along with regulatory and government contracting requirements, shows why legal needs to be involved from day one. Privacy, regulatory alignment, and risk management need to go hand in hand with product development.
The key is understanding what the business is trying to accomplish and helping them solution it
Global operations
Working across jurisdictions shapes almost every legal decision. Employment and privacy laws vary from place to place, and those differences can affect business strategy.“ The answer is going to be different by country. The key is understanding what the business is trying to accomplish and helping them solution it,” Eben notes.
He sees legal’ s role as navigating constraints while staying focused on results.“ If you cannot get from A to B in a straight line because the law in Europe is more onerous than the law in the US on a certain issue, you still help the business get to B, but you take a different route,” Eben explains.
Collaboration drives the process. Eben teams up with R & D, manufacturing, and executive leadership to proactively identify and solve business challenges, ensuring legal is part of how the company meets its business objectives. He feels effective collaboration starts with understanding the business.“ If the lawyer understands what they are trying to achieve, how they make money, what their goals are, that helps unlock a lot of doors,” he observes.
That approach also shifts how legal interacts with the rest of the organization. Rather than acting as a checkpoint or bottleneck, the function becomes a business enabler, embedding legal insight into planning and execution to drive business performance.
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