Beyond the Brief: Legal Leadership at the Sharp End of Global Logistics

Most lawyers learn the law. Jessica Meloni learned the law and then learned, alongside it, how a freight rate is constructed, how a particular type of cargo is handled, and what it means in practice when a shipping route closes overnight. "In logistics you learn to see beyond the legal," she says. "You start becoming a little bit of an engineer, a little bit of an operator, a little bit of a commercial person. You learn it in the day-to-day, because the day-to-day leaves you no choice."

Meloni is VP Legal/General Counsel Europe at CEVA Logistics and co-founder of the General Counsel Association, where she sits on the learning committee. The sector she works in is one where geopolitical events do not stay in the news — they land on her desk the same morning, in the form of a colleague who needs an answer right now because a cargo reroute is pending and the client is waiting.

That operational proximity, she argues, is not a burden. It is a competitive advantage for anyone willing to embrace it. "I push a lot for what you might call operations for non-operators," she says. "Not just legal training for non-lawyers, but the other way around: lawyers learning how the operational side works. It opens your mind. You start noticing things in a contract clause that you would never have caught if you had only ever read contracts."

Part of the resistance is built into our role itself. We are trained to think of ourselves as legal, first and foremost — and that discipline is essential. But when it becomes a boundary, it turns into a bias we need to overcome.

The question of what remains irreplaceable in the relationship between in-house counsel and external law firms is one Meloni thinks about carefully, particularly now that AI is reshaping what technical legal work looks like. Her answer is direct: experience, and the human relationship through which it is transmitted. A firm that has handled a similar matter in your sector, that has sat across the table from the same regulator, that knows how comparable companies solved the same problem — that accumulated knowledge cannot be retrieved from a database. "The AI can give you the technicalities," she says. "It cannot give you what the consultant lived through on that specific case."

What she looks for in external counsel has not changed in principle, even if the market around it has. Speed matters, because she is often under pressure and needs answers that are actionable internally. Clarity matters, because everything received has to be translated into language a CFO or operational manager can actually use. She also values something harder to quantify: the ability to stay calm when the pressure inside a deal or a crisis reaches the point where clarity becomes the scarcest resource in the room. In those moments, the role of external counsel is to support the business and the in-house legal with clear judgment, perspective and composure — helping decision-makers navigate pressure without losing clarity.

Meloni's position spans both sides of what Leaders League has framed as the shield and the sword — the compliance foundation and the strategic capacity to act. SAFE, on 5 November in Milan under the theme Governare il Rischio, Creare il Futuro, is where that conversation continues. And nowhere more pointedly than in her argument about over-regulation. When norms multiply faster than they can be harmonised across jurisdictions, she argues, the confusion that results is not merely a compliance headache — it becomes an active operational risk, one that can block business decisions just as surely as any external threat. "The norms do not talk to each other," she says. "There is no harmonisation, and that creates instability." Her prescription is clear: the general counsel has to absorb that complexity and bring clarity to the organisation, not pass the confusion on. "If we cannot make sense of it, we cannot bring clarity internally. And without clarity, business stops."

On the question of courage — asked at the close of every conversation in this series — she offers something slightly different from her peers. Yes, the general counsel needs the courage to say no when no is the right answer, and to defend that position. But the more important act of courage, in her view, is the willingness to make decisions collectively rather than alone. "We often think of taking responsibility as a solitary act," she says.

But the real skill is knowing how to bring the board, the CEO, the CFO into the decision with you. Explain the risk clearly enough that they understand it. Then decide together.

Finding those allies inside the organisation, she adds, is itself a form of legal leadership — and it starts with speaking a language the business actually understands.