Compliance Personnel refers to the individuals tasked with executing, monitoring, and supporting the organisation’s compliance obligations. These are the people who sit at the coalface of regulatory risk - interpreting rules, implementing controls, and ensuring that business conduct remains within legal boundaries.

This station focuses on the quality, competency, and integrity of those individuals. It’s not just about headcount - it’s about capability. A compliance team must be equipped with the right skills, experience, and mindset to navigate complex regulatory environments, engage with regulators, and support the business in making defensible decisions.

Legal-led compliance personnel strategy ensures that hiring, training, and performance management are aligned with legal risk frameworks. It also ensures that compliance staff are not just box-tickers, but strategic contributors who understand the commercial implications of regulatory obligations.

Without the right people in place, even the best-designed compliance frameworks will fail. This station ensures that your compliance function is staffed with professionals who can deliver real-world risk control - not just policy paperwork.

The scope of Compliance Personnel typically includes:

◼️Defining the competency framework for compliance roles across the organisation.

◼️Recruiting individuals with appropriate legal, regulatory, and industry expertise.

◼️Ensuring ongoing training and professional development aligned with evolving risks.

◼️Establishing integrity standards and ethical conduct expectations.

◼️Designing performance metrics and accountability structures.

◼️Supporting career pathways and succession planning within the compliance function.

◼️Aligning compliance staffing with business complexity and jurisdictional exposure.

◼️Integrating compliance personnel into broader governance and legal teams.

In GLS legal ops speak – the Compliance Personnel is considered a “Foundational” resource within the process ecosystem of an in-house legal team.

The Foundational Resource is a CRE that is responsible for determining the overall performance capabilities of a “critical” legal function. If it is not optimised, the function can never be optimised. 

The best practice features of the GLP are as follows:

◼️Competency-based hiring that reflects the regulatory complexity of the business.

◼️Structured onboarding and training programs tailored to compliance risk areas.

◼️Ongoing professional development linked to emerging regulatory trends.

◼️Ethical conduct standards embedded into performance management.

◼️Legal oversight of compliance personnel strategy to ensure defensibility.

◼️Clear role definitions and accountability frameworks.

◼️Cross-functional integration with legal, risk, and audit teams.

◼️Succession planning to ensure continuity and resilience in compliance leadership.

The Compliance Personnel station delivers the following value to the Business:

◼️Reduces regulatory risk by ensuring compliance tasks are executed by qualified professionals.

◼️Improves operational efficiency through skilled, confident compliance execution.

◼️Enhances credibility with regulators, investors, and partners.

◼️Supports faster issue resolution through knowledgeable frontline staff.

◼️Builds a culture of integrity and ethical conduct across the organisation.

◼️Enables scalable compliance as the business grows or enters new markets.

◼️Reduces remediation costs by preventing compliance failures before they occur.ance function.

For the legal team, strong compliance personnel reduce the burden of reactive firefighting and enable strategic oversight. Legal can focus on high-risk areas, confident that day-to-day compliance is being handled competently. It also improves collaboration, defensibility, and the ability to translate legal obligations into operational action.

The Compliance Personnel station is essential for:

◼️Legal Department Leadership

◼️Compliance Officers

◼️Risk Management Teams

◼️Internal Audit Functions

◼️Legal Operations Teams

◼️Board and Executive Leadership

A legal team operating without a Compliance Personnel strategy will face a wide range of inefficiencies including:

◼️Underqualified staff leading to poor compliance execution.

◼️Increased regulatory exposure due to missed obligations or misinterpretation.

◼️High turnover due to lack of career pathways or support.

◼️Poor collaboration between compliance and legal teams.

◼️Inconsistent standards across jurisdictions or business units.

◼️Reduced credibility with regulators and external stakeholders.

◼️Difficulty scaling compliance as the business grows.

While compliance personnel are not a tech product, their effectiveness is often enhanced by technology. Learning management systems (LMS) support training delivery, while GRC platforms enable task tracking and performance monitoring. AI tools can assist with regulatory interpretation, but human judgment remains critical - making personnel quality a key tech enabler.