GC Powerlist Germany 2019

Located in Duesseldorf, Germany, FUJIFILM Europe is a subsidiary of FUJIFILM Corporation in Tokyo, Japan. Oboama Addy has been with the company for eight years and is now serving as general counsel and chief compliance officer EMEA, covering areas such as M&A, corporate restructurings, compliance and litigation with regards to regional R&D, manufacturing, supply chain, sales and services operations across a range of business units. Leading a team of legal and compliance professionals, Addy is a highly praised legal expert, providing strong support to the business. Prior to joining FUJIFILM, Addy was senior corporate counsel and group data privacy officer at Amadeus, a travel technology company, for eight years.

Starting his professional career as an expert lawyer in banking, corporate and competition law with Buse Heberer Fromm in 2011, Florian Agthe moved in-house with app-based ride-hailing services startup company “mytaxi” two years later as legal counsel. He assumed his current position of head of legal, overseeing all legal matters for the Group consisting of the product lines mytaxi, Kapten, BEAT, HIVE and “Free Now” in 2015. He regards the legal guidance he provided during the company’s acquisition by Daimler and during its own acquisition of ‘a variety of competitors in the European market of ride-hailing’ as major career highlights that allowed him to showcase his legal talent. Going forward, Agthe envisages a more business-focused approach as the role develops: ’The role of the in-house lawyer is evolving into a more project management role with direct interaction in the project teams of the business. In-house teams are challenged more by the business to deliver direct value to business growth next to their traditional legal expert role. Therefore, in-house legal counsel will need to step-up, improving other tool kits next to their legal knowledge in order to satisfy the expectations of modern companies’.

Peter Bähr studied in Bonn, Sydney and Shanghai, and represented private practice firms in Germany and China before joining Puma in 2011. He has been general counsel Europe and EMEA for the leading global sportswear brand since January 2013. A leading member of the German in-house corporate counsel community, Bähr looks to improve the synergy of business and legal elements by regularly contributing to the legal business press, always seeing in-house counsel as strategic advisers to management.

Malte Bannenberg started his career as an associate in a small boutique law firm, before becoming part of the in-house team of a securitisation company eventually taking over from the previous head of legal, referred to by Bannenberg as ‘one of the “godfathers” of securitisation in Germany’ to lead the in-house team. In his role, he has led the bank through the financial crisis and its purchase of Gallinat-Bank. After leaving the bank in 2013 for an opportunity advising a renewable energy group to acquire, as he says, ‘experience in the business world outside the banking world’, he returned to NIBC Bank Deutschland in 2015 and has served in the role of head of legal since. During his tenure, Bannenberg has ensured that the perception of the legal department changed in his words, ‘from a department which had to be involved because of policies or to get the necessary sign-offs, but was sometimes seen as bothersome, to a department which is perceived as a go to place, which provides help and support for other departments and business units to achieve their targets and solve problems’. He highlights that, ‘this was mainly done by improving the communication and the understanding between the other departments and the legal department, for instance by having a member of the legal department regularly join team meetings in other departments, offering in-house trainings and taking the time and effort to explain legal frameworks and possibilities, which serve what is economically wanted in a legally fine way’. Bannenberg established clear roles and contacts for other departments and business units were assigned which he identifies generates ‘a higher level of trust and understanding’. This has not only changed the perception of the legal department, but also led to a different style of involvement of the legal department in the entire company and the working atmosphere in the legal department. His work has ensured that the legal department is now involved at a much earlier stage, as he says, ‘to make sure that possible legal issues in a transaction or project are taken into account right from the beginning and do not lead to problems in later or critical stages’. In the last three years, Bannenberg identifies that two transactions that stood out for him out of the more or less regular corporate and syndicated loans, structured and leveraged finance transactions and M&A deals were the IPO of NIBC Holding and the acquisition of HSH Nordbank by a consortium led by J.C. Flowers and Cerberus Capital Management. About the future of the industry he says that, ‘as in almost any area these days you have to show that you can keep up with the latest developments and possibilities new technologies can give your organisation. So in my view in-house lawyers will become managers even more, who oversee and control processes and workflows, as well as the involvement of external counsel and the usage of new technology’.

Formerly an attorney with Allen & Overy and a legal counsel for UBS, Ksenia Gräfin von Bassewitz moved to a digital capital markets start-up Acatus in late 2017. She hit the ground running, and has already had a major impact on the organisation: ‘I faced the challenge and had the privilege of creating the legal structure of the company from scratch. Acatus provides digitised single asset securitisation creating fully cleared marketable bonds. Acatus’ legal framework ensures this continuous and automated securitisation includes agreements with top-tier cooperation partners, such as Société Générale as an issuing and paying agent and custody bank, JFD Bank as a liability umbrella, originators and investors. Legal played a crucial role in drafting and negotiating the contracts. Furthermore, to this moment, we have completed the operational setup, conducted our first securitisation transactions and developed a data, commercial secrecy protection, and money laundering prevention concept’. Working at a start-up gives Gräfin von Bassewitz the opportunity to develop the team along forward-thinking lines: ‘Where traditionally general counsel focused on primarily practising law within a corporate environment, today a general counsel must offer much more than sound legal advice. The role is evolving from a risk spotter to a strategic partner who helps create value for the company’s stakeholders. Another area of continuing change for the in-house legal role is a focus on the development of non-legal skills. Development in technology urges an in-house legal counsel to look at new ways to increase productivity and maximise efficiency and value of their work’.

Dr Frank Bayer has served as the head of legal, general counsel at Lufthansa Technik, a leading manufacturer and provider of maintenance, repair, overhaul and modification services for civil aircraft, since November 2016. He joined Lufthansa Technik in 2005 and worked his way up the ranks to a number of various leading compliance roles. Dr Bayer has assisted in Lufthansa Technik’s plans to globally expand, most recently working on the expansion in Montreal and facilitating the renewal of two contracts with Croatia Airlines. He also worked on the joint venture with LG Electronics for aircraft displays and systems.

Dr Sebastian Biedenkopf joined Bosch in 2013 and has been serving as its general counsel since. Leading a highly capable legal team, he deals with a high volume of day-to-day workload, along with major deals in conjunction with this. The Bosch Group is a leading global supplier of technology and services, with its operations divided into four business sectors: mobility solutions, industrial technology, consumer goods, and energy and building technology. Dr Biedenkopf previously worked at Conergy where he was trusted to take the role as chief financial officer and interim CEO between 2010 and 2012, after first joining the company as general counsel and chief compliance officer in 2008.

Jan Bredehöft has been central to Huawei’s operations in Germany for some time, not only for his work on GDPR compliance and the implementation of a set of competition law compliance programmes, but also with regard to outsourcing and M&A transactions as well as the coordination of commercial contracts. Furthermore, he has a key role to play in handling and coordinating the legal advice related to cyber security. In an ever-expanding regulatory landscape, according to Bredehöft, it will become even more important to maintain the highly professional legal team in the company’s West European region. In the medium to long term future Bredehöft sees an expansion in technology among in-house counsel being matched by an increasing awareness of the value of interpersonal skills. ‘Due to the influence of legal tech and relevant IT tools, I would expect the amount of legal routine work to decrease substantially in the coming years. At the same time, legal departments will be able to show their growing value by providing strategic advice to the business rooted in a profound understanding of legal, compliance and political aspects of the business environment in an increasingly complex world. Outstanding communication skills in teams with diverse professional and cultural backgrounds will become even more important – not least to manage frequent dynamic changes in business and legal domains’, he explains.

Dr Stefan Brügmann has fused his legal expertise with a number of business positions during his career, which has allowed him to be particularly effective at taking other considerations into account when operating as general counsel. ‘Having worked as global head of HR for five years certainly intensified the importance I put on leadership issues’, he says. ‘In addition, working through the financial crisis with its special situations has greatly increased my resilience and long term views on management responsibility and being responsible for a number of M&A transactions has influenced my view on carful project planning on the one side and spontaneous overrides on the other’. Internally, recent months have seen a streamlining of responsibilities, an increased awareness on the part of the team towards cost management and a major effort towards digitalisation. ‘In a time of stronger cost pressures on the one side, more regulation on the other and a growing importance of digitalisation, issues will certainly lead to a number of interesting years’, Dr Brügmann explains. Most recently he was charged with combining HR and legal into one function within Helaba and has taken over the project responsibility to review all staff functions within Helaba’s current restructuring effort named “Scope”, a programme to give Helaba a sustainable growth perspective for the coming years.

Dr Markus Buchner joined the renowned legal department of Bayer group in 2013 with a clear focus on procurement and basic chemicals, both in the chemical sector. Following the spectacular carve-out of Bayer MaterialScience and its name change into Covestro in 2015, Dr Buchner became also a member of Covestro’s global Procurement Leadership Team. Covestro is among the leading suppliers of premium polymers (16,800 employees, around 30 sites across the globe, € 14.6bn sales in 2018). In this ambiance, Dr Buchner appreciates the combination of qualified legal advice, a broad spectrum of experience and strategic considerations which form a very exciting job.Prior to joining the legal department of Bayer, Dr Buchner had worked from Munich for first-class law firms (Norton Rose Fulbright and Weiss Walter Fischer-Zernin) and first-class clients on corporate, M&A, commercial, succession and civil procedure topicson a national and international level. Dr Buchner is known for his passionate ability to find simple solutions in complex situations. He is a graduate of Passau University.

Klaus Cannivé started his career as an associate in the New York Office of Clearly Gottlieb and worked more than six years for Cleary in New York and Cologne, focussing on M&A activities. His first in-house position was with Commerzbank in 2010, where he was in charge for complex capital markets and divestiture projects. From 2014 to 2016 he worked as general counsel EMEA for GfK where he had the chance to lead a legal team of a publicly traded company. At GfK he handled a complex MBO and carve out transaction which involved GFK entities in several jurisdictions. ‘It gave me a first-hand experience that detailed preparation and the focus on the commercially relevant aspects are the key aspects in deals with private equity investors’, he comments. Since 2016 Cannivé started to work as the general counsel of HARIBO, a family owned company with strong local roots and a great history. ‘HARIBO gave me the chance to assume non legal responsibility (heading global internal audit in addition to legal and compliance). My temporary assignment to the US just started while my responsibilities for the headquarters and other jurisdictions remain unaffected and I will return in 2020. I expect to further expand my understanding for the US market and the legal environment from a general counsel perspective’, he says. During his time in his current role, Cannivé has implemented a proactive style in the legal team, established legal and compliance trainings for top executives, improved global compliance culture by having better transparency and made clear allocation of responsibilities within the legal and compliance team. His efforts overall have provided the business with better protection against risks and better contract terms. Talking about his view on the role of in-house legal in the next few years, he says: ‘More flexibility and broad commercial background are required for general counsel. Digitalisation will change the way of working in the long term – with smaller teams and less standardised work by individuals. Also, changing expectations from the next generation of in-house lawyers and internal clients will require different managing and leadership styles’. During the course of the research for the GC Powerlist: Germany 2019, Cannivé took on a new role within HARIBO as head of legal, compliance and internal audit and group general counsel based in the US.

Having joined Johnson Matthey in April 2019 after over three years at Spectris, as an M&A counsel, and a previous career in top tier law firms, Dr Alexander Dähnert brings considerable skill in corporate legal affairs to the UK founded global sustainable technology company. Prior to his recent move to Johnson Matthey, Dr Dähnert’s time at Spectris as M&A counsel, was characterised by his leadership in high profile and important transactions such as the 2018 acquisition of VI-grade Group, a specialist automated controls and test systems company in the aeronautics industry.

Dr Volker Daum has proved his value to B. Braun Melsungen time and again in the decade he has been with the company. Now general counsel of B. Braun Group, he is pursuing a technologically-focused approach in the company’s legal function. ‘Continuing engagement with digital resources has enabled more tech-oriented work processes to be adopted utilising agile methods’, he explains. ‘This optimisation of processes and introduction of new software and digital methods has been perhaps the most important internal improvement to the way the team works during my tenure’. Recently, Dr Daum has worked on the introduction of a self-assessment programme for compliance and has pursued an active patent lawsuit in the US. In addition he worked on the acquisition of an over-25% stake in Rhön Klinikum.

WhiteWall Media is one of the first established online photo laboratory focused on gallery quality production, international and multichannel sales of prints, photo print, framings and mountings. Head of the legal department Yasemin Derviscemallioglu has been with the company since mid-2018, prior to which she had general counsel roles with Lamudi GmbH in Germany and a successful period in Myanmar with Apollo Towers Myanmar Ltd. and as executive committee member with the French Chamber of Commerce. At Apollo Towers Myanmar Ltd., she was instrumental in obtaining financing of US$250m from the United States Overseas Private Investment Corporation. ‘In my current role, I have established a better understanding in the other departments for the legal and compliance needs of the company’, she explains. ‘In addition, we have reduced the use of external advisors after a risk assessment and have taught the legal department to work in a matter that is understanding and supportive of the business’s needs.’ Going forward, Derviscemallioglu sees an increasingly strategic role for in-house counsel in the German business world: ‘Almost every agreement requires the involvement of various departments. Therefore, the legal In-house role requires a deep understanding of the business model and all departments. I also see a digitalization in the legal department. Contract management and contract drafting tools will involve the departments by giving them more ownership and reducing that kind of administrative work of the legal departments’.

In place at ZF Friedrichshafen since 2012, Dr Jan Eckert has overseen a number of exciting projects with the company. In addition to two public takeovers by ZF – TRW and Wabco, he has also been in charge of implementing a new governance model at the company aimed at accommodating agile business models, among other projects. ‘Generally, I have been very lucky in my career that I have been involved in many interesting projects, but a number of examples like the public takeover of Schering by Bayer and the spin-off of Lanxess stand out as highlights’, he says. ‘Through complex M&A projects, I have learned what a small dedicated team can achieve and what satisfaction the successful completion of an acquisition – especially after facing heavy competition – can bring. Going through insolvency with the IT start-up EINSTEINet Holding in 2001 has shown me that the creativity of lawyers can save the economic existence of many people, while the implementation of a new governance model was also an extremely informative episode, as this was only possible after re-defining the role of in-house lawyers in the company’. This was an extremely comprehensive programme which involved ensuring buy-in from multiple colleagues as well as the entire team: ‘The legal team at ZF has re-defined its role and transitioned from legal advisors to real business lawyers,’ says Dr Eckert.

In place as general counsel and authorised representative of Telefónica Global Services from 2014, during which time he enjoyed an enviable record of success at the telecoms giant, Florian Engel started a new career chapter in June 2019 by moving to Reverse Logistics Group as group general counsel and chief compliance officer. The company is a leading specialist for international returns management solutions and related environmental compliance tasks, and provides, via 20 regional offices on three continents, return-to-value services in more than 50 countries. Engel clearly has an extremely diverse and intellectually stimulating set of responsibilities. Engel looks back fondly on his time with Telefónica: ‘Having been legal-content-wise responsible for the Telefónica’s global procurement and, in particular, Telefónica’s worldwide buying and selling of roaming capacities in the mobile networks, brought me in contact with lawyers, legal practices and commercial cultures in each jurisdiction of the world. So, I learned to assert the company’s legal positions literally around the globe. This opened me a real international perspective on legal negotiations and contractual feasibility of the intended undertakings’. Engel looks forward to seeing where the in-house legal market goes next, and is ready to adapt and innovate in his new role. ‘As a general trend for in-house legal counselling, I would state that the life-cycles of commercial arrangements are becoming significantly shorter’, he explains. ‘We need to find new ways, processes and infrastructure to still give substantial legal advice on the one hand and to meet the shorter deadlines on the other, which means being more open for legal tech which will lead to digitalisation and even automisation in former core parts of the legal department’s services’.

Assuming his position in December 2014, Sören Erdmann serves as director legal at Blacklane, a fast growing start-up which is now present in more than 60 countries in Asia, Middle East, Australia and North America, thanks in no small part to Erdmann’s contribution. Erdmann and his team are currently in the process of implementing legal tech solutions to digitise all contract related workflows in the company, gradually involving all departments and local subsidiaries worldwide. The project will make the legal department and all legal related workflows in the global group of companies leaner, faster, and more efficient. In addition, ‘I try to put my priority on the wellbeing of the group of human beings that I am part of, i.e. the legal team. By creating a culture of open and constructive feedback in all directions (360° regardless of hierarchical structures) and building true personal relationships, I try to create a space where it is safe to speak up, safe to challenge decisions or opinions, and safe to fail. By means of empowerment, ownership and encouraging mentorship, I try to lay the foundation and create the environment for high levels of people engagement’, he says. In the past few years, Erdmann has been involved in numerous funding rounds with VCs, investment funds, and strategic investors, including the largest funding round in the company’s history. According to Erdmann, ‘we need to embrace technology and get used to constant and rapid change of digital business models and how companies operate these days. The legal profession cannot afford to repose upon its partly antiquated modes of operation. In globally operating digital companies, legal counsel will be moving away from providing classic legal advice under a given jurisdiction (which one would that be?) and instead become interdisciplinary risk managers and solution architects’, he says.

Valve is an entertainment software and technology company founded in 1996 and based in Bellevue, Washington. It is the developer of the software distribution platform Steam and the Half-Life, Counter-Strike and Dota 2 games. Dr Jan-Peter Ewert joined Valve as general counsel in 2013, firstly located in Luxembourg. In early 2017 he moved to Hamburg and has continued to serve as general counsel. Highly praised by his peers, Ewert provides solid legal advice to the business on a wide range of legal and compliance matters. Prior to moving in-house, Ewert was a law firm partner specialised in the fields of media, marketing and intellectual property.

Merck is a German multinational pharmaceutical, chemical and life sciences company headquartered in Darmstadt, with around 50,000 employees in around 70 countries. Merck was founded in 1668 and is the world's oldest operating chemical and pharmaceutical company, as well as one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. Dr Stefan Fandel works as head of group legal services at Merck, having joined the company in 2009. During his long tenure at the company, Fandel is responsible for group legal and corporate governance matters. He has also been involved in many significant transactions and deals, including handling the biggest re-structuring within Merck and working on multiple complex M&A transactions. In July 2019 Dr Fandel took on a new role within Merck’s site management organization.

Prof Dr Andreas Felder's in-house role with the legal team of Boehringer Ingelheim saw him move from his initial role as a legal counsel to head of corporate legal biopharma over the course of an eleven-year period prior to him joining Vetter Pharma as vice president legal & corporate compliance and general counsel in 2016. ‘Working for Boehringer Ingelheim in Germany and the United States and being part of a US site leadership team, the global biopharma leadership team and several legal management teams, as well as having worldwide responsibility for all legal topics of the biopharma business of the company was definitely a career highlight’, he says of this period of his career. With Vetter Pharma, Prof Dr Felder continued to develop the legal and compliance department as a proactive, helpful partner that is a benefit for the company and which is proactively contacted by the internal business partners. Over the long term, he believes that ‘lean legal processes, legal tech and legal operations management will continue to assume greater importance, particularly when it comes to doing "more with less" and to provide lean and proper risk management solutions’. In addition, ‘cooperation with external law firms will dramatically change’.

Brenntag is the global market leader in chemical distribution. It operates a global network with more than 580 locations in 76 countries. With its global workforce of more than 16,600 employees, the company generated sales of €12.6bn in 2018. The legal department of Brenntag is headed by general counsel Dr Frank Fischer, who has been with the company since 2010. He started his career with Hengeler and then worked for E.ON in different positions. In his current role, he has successfully implemented legal compliance standards for Brenntag Group and established a global network of in-house lawyers. During the past three years, Dr Fischer and his legal team have been actively involved in various M&A transactions on all five continents, providing expert legal advice to the business.

Dr Uwe Foertsch assumed his current position as general counsel at Thyssenkrupp Marine Systems in May 2018. Previously, he served as general counsel at Ernst Russ (formerly HCI Capital) from 2007 to 2018. In his in-house legal career, Foertsch has had a number of highlights, including dealing with the restructuring of a publicly listed company with a volume of €1.6bn, handling civil court litigations of up to €130m as well as several ICC arbitrations of up to €2.5bn. He has also been heavily involved in several M&A transactions that amount to a total volume of €20m during the past few years. In his current role, Dr Foertsch has successfully integrated two legal departments that were previously part of two separate legal entities into one team, and standardised corporate housekeeping and legal templates such as NDAs. Talking about how he sees the in-house legal role evolving over the next few years, Dr Foertsch says: ‘[in-house counsel will be] much more involved in business, moving from a merely counsel status towards commercial business enabler’.

Beginning his career in a major law firm, Dr Frank Forster made the move to in-house legal work with Aurelius (now Aurelius Equity Opportunities) eleven years ago as an M&A specialist and has never looked back; he was made general counsel six years ago and has excelled in the role since. ‘I have accompanied Aurelius on their way from an advanced start-up to one of the larger European private equity firms’, he says. ‘To contribute to the advancement of the company along with our talented and hard-working people ranks as my major career highlight’, Dr Forster explains. He has also built an extremely capable legal team to assist the company in its endeavours: ‘We developed a truly European legal department which can deal with all issues arising in the transactional and operative business’.

Having joined the bank in 1997, Ulrich Freitag has gone through a number of exciting periods with IKB Deutsche Industriebank, including founding the company’s legal capital markets team and shepherding the institution through the challenges of the financial crisis, before assuming his current position of general counsel and head of legal. Now in a position where he coordinates extremely closely with senior management and advises on the key strategic matters, Freitag continues to innovate within the department. ‘The major highlights of my recent time with IKB Deutsche Industriebank have – beneath numerous complex capital market transactions – included the implementation of a cloud-based digital platform providing full digital workflow for the legal department and (prospectively) the whole company, including state-of-the-art search and analytic tools’, Freitag explains.

Hamburg Commercial Bank (formerly HSH Nordbank) is a commercial bank in northern Europe with headquarters in Hamburg as well as Kiel, Germany. It is active in corporate and private banking and its head of legal and director is Dr Till Friedrich who assumed his current role in June 2019, having joined HSH Nordbank in August 2014. Prior to moving in-house, he worked in private practice as an associate at Dechert. During the past few years, Friedrich has been contributing substantially to the business’s major deals and transactions. For example, between 2017 and 2018, he advised on the sales process and privatisation (signing and closing) of HSH Nordbank (including rebranding and the reorganisational process from a publicly owned Landesbank to private equity-owned private bank), especially in areas of due diligence and negotiation process regarding the old and new shareholder as well as ECB, Directorate-General for Competition (DG Comp) and deposit protection schemes. More recently, he has been helping the bank restructure its hybrid capital structure, including the termination of AT1-Instruments and the counselling in various related lawsuits. His current role is characterised by ‘the focus on strategic topics such as bank’s privatisation and the current restructuring programme’, he says. From his point of view, ‘in-house legal has to strike a balance between being a relevant (HR) cost factor on one hand and being included in all relevant (strategic and business) projects on the other hand. This can only be achieved by using digitalisation technology and a clear focus on legal core issues (being handled internally without external support)’.

Dr Martin Fröhlich has worked on some of the most exciting M&A developments in the food sector in the past few years in his position of general counsel and head of M&A for KRÜGER Group. 2018 saw the acquisition of the Maximuscle and MaxiNutrition brands from GlaxoSmithKline, an extremely sage move given the brand’s popularity in the lucrative and growing sports nutrition and healthy food sector in the UK. ‘The Maxi acquisition was not only in terms of operational involvement key for the Group but also because these well-known brands formed the basis for the newly established business unit to roll out its activities in Europe’, Dr Fröhlich explains. ‘The acquisition of the Maximuscle and MaxiNutrition brands was one of my key highlights in my in-house career so far. It was a very important experience to be involved in an M&A process not only from the beginning of the (legal) acquisition process but also until the very end of the post-closing integration process. This experience has broadened my horizon in terms of requirements for an in-house counsel. It has been a highlight to accompany and support such a project in a way an external counsel would never have’. The year 2019 has continued the Group’s expansive M&A posture: ‘In 2019 the KRÜGER Group acquired the German healthy bars company HAFERVOLL. Although a start-up, it is a market leader in the fast-growing healthy snacking segment in Germany. This was again a milestone for the still young healthy food business unit’. Dr Fröhlich has been with the KRÜGER Group legal team since its inception, and recalls his first objectives upon establishing the team. ‘I first hat to gently “educate” the organisation that the legal department is not a blocker to the business but a true business partner and an efficient service provider that adds value and offers benefit. The legal department is now involved and consulted in all major projects early-on’. In terms of extra-curricular activities, Dr Fröhlich has one particularly rewarding role. Besides his professional career with the KRÜGER Group, he is currently serving as unsalaried, honorary president of the German traditional football club Alemannia Aachen and contributed with his legal background to the restructuring and reorganisation of the club after insolvency proceedings.

Wholly-owned by Bertelsmann, Arvato Systems develops and implements innovative solutions for business customers around the world. These include SCM solutions, financial services and IT services, which are continuously developed with a focus on innovations in automation and data analytics. Jochen Fuchs is the head of legal affairs and chief compliance officer, who joined the company in 2006 and took the challenge of creating the legal team from scratch in 2012. The team now consists of 14 highly specialised and innovative legal experts dealing with a range of legal, compliance and GDPR matters. Recognising the importance of legal technology, Fuchs implemented a global e-signing solution and developed a self-service legal template database that works both as a sales enabler and an internal automation tool for various administrative compliance processes. In his current role, Fuchs has enabled the legal function to serve not just as a support function, but as a respected business partner at board level. In addition, he has successfully added data protection, contract management, ethics and compliance, IT compliance, sanction list screening and guidelines and processes to the legal department’s scope of responsibilities. According to Fuchs, ‘legal professionals need to evolve into digital specialists who have deep knowledge and understanding of integrated business processes and technology. The legal profession itself needs to face the challenges of digitisation of legal services’, he says.

Molecular Health analyses the molecular and clinical data of individual patients against the world’s medical, biological, and pharmacological knowledge, to drive more precise diagnostic, therapeutic, and drug safety decisions. Taking charge of the extremely complicated legal requirements for such a forward-thinking business in a heavily-regulated sector is general counsel Michael H. Ghaffar, in place since July 2016. Prior to working with Molecular Health, Ghaffar was vice president and general counsel at Samsung Europe and also enjoyed an extremely successful private practice career culminating as a partner with DLA Piper.

Formerly an equity partner at Clifford Chance and head of legal affairs at Metro, Dr Rolf Giebeler joined defence and automotive powerhouse Rheinmetall as general counsel in March 2015. An extremely forward-thinking general counsel, Dr Giebeler has prioritised close business cooperation from his legal team since taking over, and always looks to maintain a cutting-edge legal department that is able to provide first-class support to the business. Among other eye-catching projects that Dr Giebeler has supported, October 2019 saw the company land a €300m armament contract from Hungary for the manufacture of the main armament and fire control systems for 44 Leopard 2 tanks and 24 PzH 2000 self-propelled howitzers.

Bertelsmann is a media, services and education company that operates in about 50 countries around the world. The company has 117,000 employees and generated revenues of €17.7bn in the 2018 financial year. Heading the legal department of Bertelsmann, general counsel, Dr Thomas Götz is a highly experienced lawyer who joined the company in 1998 and assumed his current role in 2014. In 2018, Dr Götz advised on the formation of Majorel, ‘where Bertelsmann and Saham Group bundled their worldwide CRM activities’, he says. Götz also serves as a supervisory board member of Majorel. In addition, during the past few years, he has been a member of the board of directors at the broadcaster RTL Group (a listed company) and the leading trade book publisher Penguin Random House.

Based in Stuttgart, Dennis Grabherr currently serves as vice president and associate general counsel at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, covering DACH, France and Northern Europe with support from his international legal team of 25 lawyers, in which ten are based in Germany. Previously, he worked for BT Global Services for more than a decade. Talking about his experience at BT, Grabherr says, ‘the insights gained during my legal data governance role with BT Global Services – at the time one of the largest data processors on earth, have fundamentally changed my approach towards customer and personal data handling‘. In his current role, Grabherr and his team was largely involved in the regional implementation of what Grabherr says has been referred to as “the largest corporate separation in recent years”: the split of Hewlett-Packard Company into two separately listed entities, HP Incorporated and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company. ‘This (and multiple spin-mergers and acquisitions thereafter) taught me how large parts of the corporate work, which otherwise would be been handled by outside counsel, can effectively and cost-efficiently be handled in-house‘, he comments. Over the next few years, Grabherr expects to see ‘increased use of metrics and legal tech tools as well as growing visibility and relevance of general counsel at board level‘.

Having been a member of the general counsel’s office of EY in Germany since 2005, Sven Hähnel began his career with the firm in 1999 as an intern, working his way up in rank to co-general counsel in 2007, and regional general counsel for Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Liechtenstein (director rank) in 2008. During this time he also went on secondment to the EY office in London. In 2009 he passed his business mediator exam and in 2010 was promoted to partner, which as he says is ‘a nice achievement for an in-house lawyer in a professional services firm, where partners are usually measured by the fees they earn’. Since 2015, he has been a member of the GSA (Germany, Switzerland and Austria) regional leadership team. During his tenure Hähnel has changed his department from being mainly administrative to a business oriented legal department where each lawyer acts as a trusted business advisor. He identifies that, ‘team members are dedicated to specific service line offerings of EY and we developed them as subject matter experts for certain cross-service line matters (for instance in anti-money laundering, sanctions, anti-bribery, third-party agreements, non-disclosure agreements) so that they also have the advantage of a variety of matters they have to deal with regardless of their service line dedication’. Hähnel especially encourages lawyers of all GSA countries to consult with these experts and this enables the firm to better address potential shortages of legal capacities and competencies in the countries of its regions. Its team members are closely connected with their internal clients and can anticipate their developments and needs. In addition it has a recurring initiative to improve the way it handles legal matters to help client-facing colleagues with better, faster and simpler legal processes through better templates, less consultation or approval requirements, artificial intelligence or other technical solutions, or outsourcing to one of EY’s shared service centres. Hähnel highlights that in the future his team will be influenced by new technologies. He says that, ‘technology, specifically AI, will hopefully evolve and will release lawyers from work that will not require a deep legal expertise so that they can focus on matters that require our expertise. We are desperately working on and spending time and money for a semantic recognition platform that will hopefully help us review non-disclosure agreements… AI should enable lawyers to become even more agile and nevertheless being able to provide the best legal advice, ready to be used’. Hähnel values teamwork and cooperation within his team and in a wider sense working together across the organisation with clients, as well as diversity and inclusion policies, and the mentoring of junior lawyers. He is a commendable leader with extensive knowledge of the professional services sector.

Dr Arnd Haller joined Google in 2005 as its first legal counsel in Germany for the DACH region. He currently leads a team of 30 lawyers and is part of the management team of Google Germany. Since Haller started at Google, the company has grown from achieving US$6bn in revenue in 2005 to US$136bn in 2018. The biggest challenge for him was to keep track of the growing size of the company, the increased complexity (from a search engine to a company with hundreds of products reaching over one billion people globally) and the changed legislative landscape. In his long tenure at Google, Haller runs and supervises a significant number of litigation cases and regulatory proceedings. Many of the cases have “made history” in internet law, for example, Google Adwords (trademark-as-a-keyword cases), the legality of StreetView in Germany, and various liability cases for Google Websearch, Google Book Search, Google Image Search, Blogger where all cases were decided by the German Supreme Court (Bundesgerichtshof). Some of the pending cases at the Court of Justice of the European Union including: Peterson vs YouTube, VG Media case, and Gmail vs. BNetzA. In Haller’s view, ‘Artificial intelligence will be a major driver for changes in the legal profession. The introduction of AI in the daily business has just began and will speed up dramatically in the next years. This shift requires a new classification of liability risks. Also, legal tech can help legal departments to work faster and more efficient and allow lawyers to concentrate on delivering higher quality advice rather than administrative, lower value tasks’. Haller also thinks ‘Legal departments can drive changes in the legal profession when it comes to diversity. Big law firms are still far too dominated by male colleagues, in particular at partner level. While this is a known problem there is still not enough emphasis to change this situation. The same is true when it comes to other diversity aspects, socio-cultural background. Companies like Google can make a difference by supporting female lawyers, for example through asking firms for a mixed team of lawyers, inviting younger female lawyers them to events, asking for participation on panels and more’, he says. Apart from his role at Google, Haller is a founding board member of the search engine for kids, fragFINN, and enjoys to support this NGO that aims at increasing media literacy skills of younger kids with his expertise.

After having worked for different international law firms, Dr Karsten Hardraht joined KfW’s legal division in 2006. Before being appointed as general counsel in 2016, he held different executive positions in KfW, including management affairs and regulatory compliance. In his role as general counsel, Hardraht implemented the concept of steering legal risk, established the role of the legal division within the concept of three lines of defence, improved the integration of legal in internal committees as well as the reporting and process-integrated role – ‘and we are working constantly on client focus and sharpening our risk culture. All that increased visibility and integration into KfW’s value chain – which also helps mitigate KfW’s legal risk’, he says. In addition, Hardraht’s legal function expanded and has been working on enhancing legal spend management, including the use of legal tech solutions for this and other purposes. ‘Legal tech solutions, even more standardisation of workflows and documentation and tailor-made agile methods for legal work will help us focus on what really matters and gain time for these projects in which the legal counsel like to work on the most and where they are mostly needed’, he explains. As head of KfW’s regulatory compliance, Hardraht also worked closely with the banking supervisory authorities, focused on internal processes and got deep insights into risk management. ‘This experience convinced me, that the role of a legal division should not be limited to giving legal advice but has to focus on actively steering legal risk’, he comments. In Hardraht’s view, ‘in-house legal will become even more integrated into and will have an even more active role in strategic as well as operational projects. Also, the role of legal operations in general – including legal tech solutions and legal spend management – will evolve constantly’.

Dr Gabriel Harnier, general counsel at Bayer, has been with the company since 2016 and has significant experience operating in-house legal departments at the highest level in the healthcare industry. In July 2019, Dr Harnier led the legal arrangements from Bayer’s side of the sale of Bayer’s prescription dermatology business to LEO Pharma, a Danish market leader in dermatological treatments and research.

Her previous career shaped by her activity as a corporate, M&A and commercial law specialist, Amely Haußer joined TUI Cruises in October 2016, and draws on this prior expertise in her current role. In particular, she mentions the ‘project management, accuracy and timely advice’ she has learned to prioritise at TUI Cruises as being particularly helpful alongside ‘the more specific cruise and travel operator knowledge for the daily questions’. The company’s rapid growth, which it has enjoyed since its establishment in 2008 has continued under Haußer’s tenure, bringing with it large transactions and, with it, a certain level of pressure that she has handled excellently. ‘The variety of legal areas in a high number of jurisdictions and with different contractual partners means every day is fascinating’ she says of her time with TUI Cruises. She adds, ‘the business includes shipbuilding activities, travel, hotel and restaurant operations, flights purchasing and coordination of event activities, medical services and shore excursions in almost all parts of the world. You need to develop an approachable hands-on style in order to be able to support the operations. One of my business highlights has been the participation in our expansion offensive in 2018 that included several huge projects, including the order and financing of several new vessels, the sale of an old vessel, and the acceptance and delivery of new vessels. A good multi-disciplinary in-house team work creates a great common spirit and satisfaction’. In the future, next to upcoming projects Haußer anticipates work on standardisation and digitalisation to remain a topic, which will allow her to ‘focus of the really important issues’.

Oliver Hengeler, director legal, EMEA at Calypso TechnologyI started his career in 2001 as legal counsel at T-Systems, the enterprise customers division of Deutsche Telekom in Frankfurt. From 2006 to 2012, he worked for Wall Street Systems (later acquired by ION Group), a New York and London based trading and treasury management software provider, as senior legal counsel in their Frankfurt and London offices. Hengeler highlights the opportunity he had when working closely with ION’s CEO and founder Andrea Pignataro during the integration of Wall Street Systems into ION. During 2012 and 2013, Hengeler was associate general counsel at AvePoint. In 2013, he joined Calypso Technology, a San Francisco based software vendor, as their first lawyer in Europe. In 2016, privately-owned Calypso was acquired by private equity firms Bridgepoint and Summit Partners, where Hengeler was largely involved in the acquisition. In 2019 he was appointed as the lead counsel of Calypso, leading a global legal team for the first time in his career. During his time in current role, Hengeler has shifted the team’s mind-set so that every team member aims to become a trusted business advisor. ‘This requires each lawyer to fully understand the business we are operating in. Calypso’s legal team is highly visible, provides gravitas, credibility and enjoys high reputation within the organisation’, says Hengeler. Commenting on how he sees the in-house legal role evolving, he states, ‘Over the next few years in-house legal counsel in Germany will slip more into the role of trusted business advisors, similar to how the role evolved in the US. I think the more developed a market is and the more sophisticated a business is run, the more an organisation will realise the benefits of having a strong legal in-house team’.

Torsten Hildebrand joined the WERTGARANTIE Group as general counsel in 2017. At WERTGARANTIE he is responsible for all legal, regulatory, governance and compliance matters of the organisation and part of the leadership team. Prior to his current role, Hildebrand had a successful 13-year spell at AIG in a number of positions, finally as head of legal for Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Hildebrand explains that his move from private practice to an internal position was an important landmark in his career: ‘The perspective, the interaction with stakeholders, the complexity and variety of legal work as well as the collaboration with diverse and cross-functional teams have become a new dimension. The entrepreneurial freedom that AIG and WERTGARANTIE have given me has also positively moulded me as a business lawyer’. Over the past two years, Hildebrand has formed a pioneering team and brought the legal department closer to the company’s business units. ‘General counsel must seize opportunities that are also recognised by the company. This requires a committed and future-oriented team that is willing to add value’. He also works closely with the IT team to explore, develop and implement new automated processes and task management tools, has applied new agile working methods that help manage instructions more efficiently and implemented a strong document management and filing system that supports the administration and reporting of the legal department. The last three years have been very busy for both Hildebrand and his team: ‘In addition to our daily work, we have carried out several key projects with significant impact on our business, which have shaped the workload of my team. We reorganised the group structure, established a new support unit for the board of directors and the supervisory board, identified a panel of external lawyers supporting us internationally, ensured compliance with the GDPR and implemented the EU Insurance Distribution Directive. From a business perspective, a major achievement was the regulatory approval of a new line of business in mandatory motor vehicle insurance to insure so-called light electric’. His advice to aspiring general counsel is: ‘Immerse yourself in the business, be proactive and contribute to a sustainable business strategy. Let people understand that the in-house legal function adds value. Lead with trust and respect to ensure employees give their best’. In addition to his current activities as general counsel, he teaches regularly at the Faculty of Law of Leibniz University Hannover.

Already an extremely highly regarded in-house counsel, Elizabeth Hincapié is clearly regarded as a rising star of the in-house legal world based on the strength of the nominations she received and her performance up to this point as senior legal counsel for Leica Camera. ‘In my position as a senior legal counsel I have achieved a number of important goals under general counsel Florian Schäfer. In addition to advising on the expansion of the group, in particular with the foundation of two new subsidiaries in Germany and in Spain along with a new Leica Store in Madrid, I have worked on the modernisation of our dispute resolution strategy and the design of new adaptive arbitration clauses according to the type of contract and counterparty. As well as this, I have designed and coordinated with IT a new task manager in order to facilitate the tasks of my general counsel at a glance by means of statistics’. Hincapié possesses a deep sense of social responsibility that, in conjunction with her legal skill, allows her to assist others: ‘As a Colombian lawyer in Germany, my professional life has been on a constant challenge. But just as a calm sea has never made a skilled sailor, the setbacks I encountered led me to my greatest achievements, such as my bar admissions in Germany and in Spain. As a result of my experiences, I identify the necessity to assist foreign lawyers in Germany, who are seeking advice. Furthermore, I wanted to not only be mindful about the difficulties of being a female-lawyer to climb up the career ladder but to do something about it; the result is a promising project to be launched soon’.

With a transaction volume of approximately €1bn and a managed investment volume of over €600m in renewable energy facilities, AREAM has over 10 years of experience in managing renewable energy assets for professional and semi-professional investors. Its general counsel Thomas Hopp assumed his current position in 2016 and is responsible for handling a wide range of legal and regulatory issues for the company. With extensive experience in the legal sector, Hopp is also largely involved in AREAM’s major partnerships, deals and transactions.

Starting his professional career with German IT law boutique firm Bartsch und Partner, in Karlsruhe, Dr Olaf Johannsen took his first in-house role with Otto Group before joining Lufthansa Technik in 2011, progressing to his current role as head of legal Americas in 2016. ‘Working closely with the business is one of the main advantages of an in-house position’, Dr Johannsen explains. ‘This very close alignment resulted in many highlights over the years. Naming some of them would certainly include the complex negotiations in course of a large outsourcing project at the Otto Group as well as a major patent claim for Lufthansa Technik. And of course today, leading a team with extraordinary team members who are responsible for all legal matters in the entire region of the Americas is a true highlight on a day-to-day basis’. Always a team player, Dr Johannsen is keen to emphasise his status as just one part of an overall effort by the Lufthansa Technik legal function: ‘The legal department of Lufthansa Technik is part of the group-wide legal department of Lufthansa and all changes are a true teamwork success rather than the success of a single member. For example, led by Dr Hans-Joachim Arnold, we developed a group-wide legal strategy to ensure that every in-house counsel is as close to the business as possible, prepared for the digital transformation of our business as well as our legal department and an integral part of a strong team that is strongly supported by our leadership’.

Gazprom Germania is a subsidiary of the world’s largest natural gas producer, Moscow-based Gazprom. Since its establishment in 1990, Gazprom Germania has developed into an internationally operating group of 44 companies in 15 countries in Europe and Asia. Dr Jörg Kammerer joined the company in 2008 and is now serving as its general legal counsel, responsible for dealing with all legal related matters for the business. He is involved in the company’s major deals and transactions, providing expert professional legal advice. Recently, with a total of €500,000 the Gazprom Germania Group supports two important projects in the municipality of Jemgum in Lower Saxony, underlining Gazprom’s commitment to assume social responsibility at company locations.

For decades, Hamburg-based ECE has been developing, building, leasing out and managing large commercial properties in the business areas of shopping centres, office, traffic and industries. As general counsel, Joachim Kämpf has been instrumental in leading a number of high profile transactions and projects. Amongst these, is his recent involvement in the acquisition of two shopping centres in Poland. Supporting ECE in its management and leasing of the properties in the country, Kämpf has advised ECE in establishing a market leading position and increasing assets under management in Poland to a total of ten centers. Prior to this, he served as an in-house counsel at Infrastrukturbau, advising in the areas of construction and real estate law.

Tech-savvy lawyer, Claus Kaufmann, possesses a strong track record of building and managing global teams in the area of computer and network security. With over 15 years of experience in various leadership roles in the US and Europe, Kaufmann brings a robust and glittering portfolio to Avira where he currently leads the network protection business unit. Starting his career with Avira in 2008, Kaufmann started as a legal counsel, working his way up to take on the role of vice president operations in 2012 and eventually to the role of general counsel in 2009, a position he’s held for nine years in addition to leading the network protection business unit.

Katrin Kerschbaumer started her legal career in 2005 as a corporate lawyer focusing on M&A transactions in international law firms (Norton Rose and Taylor Wessing) before moving in-house five years later. In her first in-house position at Kabel Deutschland, which she held for more than five years, Kerschbaumer continued working on M&A and general corporate law but focused more on capital markets. In 2013, Kabel Deutschland was taken over by Vodafone and Kerschbaumer describes the transaction as ‘very intense and complex’, ‘I [had] a lot of management attention and strategic questions as well as difficult legal matters. In addition, one had to separate between the professional tasks and the personal concerns in a takeover and restructuring environment. I appreciated a lot the very interesting project and learned that such challenges can lead to opportunities even though the matter at hand seems to be risky at first sight’, she says. Based on her previous experience, in 2015 she was appointed as general counsel (including the chief of the compliance function) by Kontron, a publicly listed company where she had managerial responsibility for the first time. In 2016, Kerschbaumer greatly contributed to Kontron’s sale of its 49% stake in Canadian subsidiary for approximately €52.2m to and a strategic partnership with Ennoconn Corporation (Taiwan). In December 2017, she assumed her current position as head of corporate legal affairs at the MDAX listed GEA Group, leading a team of corporate legal experts. In her current position, she has made a number of positive changes to the legal function, including standardising and implementing work flows in capital market compliance, shareholding management and corporate governance, allowing more efficient and professional legal feedback to the internal clients. In 2018, Kerschbaumer and her team have substantially contributed to GEA’s acquisition and integration of Pavan (Italy), a company with revenue of around €155m and EBITDA of almost €29m prior to the acquisition.

Hyun-Soo Kim has a number of highlights to look back on over the course of an over decade-long career with Hyundai Motor Europe. ‘When I joined Hyundai Motor Europe in 2007 as general legal counsel’, he recalls, ‘all national Hyundai distributors in Europe were independent third parties except for the ones located in the UK and Poland. A strategic decision was made to reorganise the distribution network through acquiring the seven most important distributors which were then consolidated into the Hyundai Group. My role was initially to handle all legal matters of these acquisitions but developed soon into covering commercial aspects as well and, at the peak of this reorganisation phase in 2011, I was in charge of negotiating both legal and commercial terms. This acquisition remains the biggest transaction of the Group in Europe to date’. More recently, Kim continues to be at the epicentre of strategic projects for the company: ‘Another highlight would be my work on protecting the Hyundai selective distribution system in Europe. In the beginning of 2016 Hyundai became aware of an increasing trend of unauthorised distribution of new Hyundai vehicles originating from within the European Economic Area (EEA) and outside the EEA. To stop the unauthorised distribution of Hyundai vehicles originating from outside the EEA required the application of European trademark law and local case law. The structure, principles and validity of our selective distribution system were secured and obviously further damages to us and our three retail network could be prevented. Within eleven months, in total more than 650 involved unauthorised commercial resellers across Europe signed a cease and desist declaration. To further enhance the protection of our selective distribution system from unauthorised sales of Hyundai vehicles originating from within the EEA, I developed an innovative solution. The concept is to limit the manufacturer’s warranty to genuine products that have been sold through the official network. All products sold by unauthorised resellers would not be covered despite being genuine. As of 1st March 2017, Hyundai changed the terms and conditions of its five-year unlimited manufacturer’s warranty across the EEA and Switzerland. The specific customer protection programme is currently being rolled out throughout Europe’. Building on his excellent legal and business expertise in order to find genuinely innovative solutions to strategically important company issues, Kim is a model in-house counsel for others to emulate. As for what he believes the optimal quality that an in-house lawyer should have, he is clear: ‘The most important characteristic is to proactively identify the needs and challenges the business is facing and to be able to bring innovative working solutions’.

Formerly an associate at Shearman & Sterling, from 1998 to 2001, Uta Klawitter headed the corporate law department at DaimlerChrysler. After taking over as director of corporate and capital market law at Deutsche Telekom, she joined Fresenius as head of legal in 2010. Joining Audi in July 2019 as general counsel Klawitter looks set to continue her already impressive record of success at the global automotive powerhouse.

Christof Koester is the senior vice president and general counsel EMEA at Fresenius Medical Care, a world leading healthcare company with focused expertise on dialysis machinery, treatment and research. With over 10 years of experience in the healthcare sector at Fresenius, including multiple board positions, Koester is recognised as a leading market expert in the healthcare and corporate affairs discipline in EMEA. Over the last year, Koester led the legal department on important transactions such as the investment of €60m in Unicyte, a regenerative medicine company specialised in liver and kidney diseases, and an independent affiliate of Fresenius.

Beginning with Sodexo in 2014, prior to which he had an approximately nine-year spell with the NTT Group, Ingo Köhler-Bartels – as part of the Sodexo global legal department – is now general counsel for Central Europe as well as a member of the regional leadership committee, German country committee and is also tasked with responsibility for all insurance and data privacy matters. ‘From the very beginning of my time with Sodexo’, Köhler-Bartels explains, ‘I had the objective of acting as a truly trusted business partner. To foster an intense communication and be and remain fully aware of the business goals, we have established an engagement model between legal counsel and the business on a first point of contact model instead of a single point of contact model. This sounds like only a tiny difference but has a bigger leverage. It helps to build teams but it does not necessarily bind people together. As such it is more agile and also respects the human aspect in a virtual team’. His latest challenge is the implementation of a new regional structure. ‘In September 2018 we built the Central European region within Sodexo enclosing eight countries. For the legal function this meant and still means a lot of work around compliance, statutory, governance and corporate matters’. Köhler-Bartels supports the in-house legal world and believes it has even more to give to the business landscape. ‘I think it is time to focus on the in-house role much more’, he states. ‘While it is big business and we could not operate without the expertise the external advisors and law firms bring and the risks they take, it is a reciprocal relationship; they need us as well. In the future, legal aspects may become a more integral part of businesses and, as such, legal counsel will be asked to understand themselves as a more integral part of the business. The need for legal expertise will also change – there is much more to be evaluated and handled than recurrent limitation of liability clauses’.

General counsel, vice president legal and contracts and chief compliance officer for defence major, Thales, Dr André Körtgen reflects on the growth he has achieved over his professional career and what aspects in particular have been most rewarding: ‘Having been a commuter between in-house and private practice legal [prior to his current role, Körtgen was a partner at a Munich law firm], today it feels highly satisfying to manage the transformation of a legal and a contract management function and to guide a company in times of change. One of my key learnings was to understand the relevance of change management and to put the human being into the centre of all initiatives’. At Thales, his integration of contract management professionals into the legal function has been extremely successful, as has his transition to his dual role as chief compliance officer in addition to general counsel for legal and contracts and his work on the integration of Gemalto. ‘My management of a crisis project as a member of a cross-functional team was also highly rewarding’, he continues. ‘It was multi-level stakeholder management at its best – we created win-win scenarios by listening to our partners and practicing patience.’ Within the team, Dr Körtgen reports that ‘breaking up pillars and sharing resources between different business units has increased flexibility and helps control costs’, while training sessions have also had a noticeably positive effect on partners within the business. In the future, Dr Körtgen believes that ‘the in-house legal role will become broader in terms of needed competences and will become more embedded in the mainstream business of the company’.

Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) is a leading professional services firm that specialises in real estate and investment management. It is a Fortune 500 company with annual revenue of US$16.3bn, operations in over 80 countries and a global workforce of nearly 92,000 as of June 2019. Antonios Kotsis is leading the legal and compliance department of JLL Germany, dealing with all legal and compliance related matters for the business. As head of legal and compliance, Kotsis has successfully created a supportive and collaborative team atmosphere where team members actively share information with each other. He has also been involved in the company’s major deals and transactions, providing expert legal advice.

Swedish bank, Klarna provides an array of online financial services to its clients, such as online storefronts, post purchase payments and direct payments. Miyu Lee is an integral part of these processes, ensuring the legal aspect of all these services are carried out compliantly and efficiently. Trained in the areas of fintech, digital payment and banking solutions, Lee brings a wide-ranging skillset to the global legal team and is well equipped to deal with the daily legal matters of Klarna. Her competency in these areas is also enforced by her previous role as director legal and general counsel at online payment provider, BillPay. Lee recently assisted in the collaboration with e-commerce website, Etsy, for the launch of new payment options for shops in Germany from June 2018 onwards.

In place at BMW since 2005, originally as an in-house lawyer focused on capital markets, Dr Andreas Liepe’s career with the car manufacturing superpower took an interesting route early on. He began to specialise in the company’s Asian distribution and manufacturing facilities from 2007 onwards, moving to Beijing in 2011 heading BMW’s legal department in China, before returning to Germany in 2014 as assistant general counsel heading a legal department and advising on all legal matters relating to production, sales, marketing, data privacy and digital business worldwide. He continues to advise the company on its Chinese operations and, after having approximately 13 years understanding the market there, now possesses profound knowledge and experience of Chinese regulations – especially its foreign investment regime – and has advised on Chinese joint ventures and foreign direct investments on many occasions. In 2018, he worked on the first ever transaction in which a foreign automotive company was allowed to increase its share in a Chinese automotive joint venture above 50%. This landmark transaction was reported in the press worldwide. Going forward, Dr Liepe believes that in-house counsel will have to continue to raise their game in order to provide the best possible support to their companies. ‘I see an increased demand for high class in-house legal advice’, he explains. ‘The regulatory environment changes rapidly. Also, trade wars, digitalisation and other disrupting factors require companies to adapt quickly. As a consequence, the volume and the complexity of legal advice increases’.

Jan Liersch started his legal career at Hengeler Mueller in 2003. In 2007 he made the move in-house by joining Klöckner & Co as legal counsel, where he was later appointed as head of HR, legal and compliance in January 2015. In 2011, he contributed significantly to the acquisition of Macsteel Service Centre US, doubling the Group’s US activities. From 2016 to 2019 he served as head of compliance, legal, strategy and group development at Asklepios Kliniken, where he dealt with the acquisition of several small eHealth start-ups by Asklepios. He was also largely involved in the acquisition of Grand Hotel Suisse Majestic in 2017 and the acquisition of Fairmont Le Montreux Palace in 2018. Since May 2019 he has taken the CEO position of Broermann Holding, the sole shareholder of Asklepios, where he is in charge of legal affairs in addition to his other responsibilities. In his view, ‘legal tech will change the way in which law firms and in-house departments collaborate and the way in which law firms support in-house departments. Digitalisation will further increase the importance of tech and IP-savvy lawyers (in-house and in private practice) to advise on evolving or new business models’, he comments.

A highly capable legal professional, head of legal, procurement and analytics and services Dr Peter Macheiner established the legal department for SYNLAB group from scratch. Talking about one of his top career highlights, he says, ‘it was a very large and long lasting litigation involving several departments where I was able to combine legal advice with a very broad management task to get many involved persons with different seniority levels from different departments to co-operate in an excellent manner and to keep them motivated under extreme time pressure over a very long period of time to do the “one step more” to bring that litigation to an excellent success’. During the past few years Dr Macheiner has been involved in all major M&A transactions – approximately 90 since 2015. He is also responsible for all procurement matters including establishing new procurement contracts for the Group. According to Dr Macheiner, ‘the in-house legal role will get more and more business driven by taking into account all compliance issues to support the company as efficiently as possible and protecting it at the same time’, he says.

Elise Martello has served as the general counsel at worldwide supplier of industrial coatings and global market leader of coil coatings, Beckers, since August 2018. She boasts an impressive portfolio, having previously served as a senior legal counsel at Lumesse for over two years. Also amassing experience in private practice, Martello previously was a senior associate at K&L Gates and a lawyer for Australian law firm, Middletons.

Moving to Atotech and the German market in June 2019 following an extremely successful career in the United States and Switzerland with notable roles at Weatherford, PSC and Air Liquide, Josh M. McMorrow now takes on a wide-ranging role with a direct report to the CEO. When discussing the unique qualities that make for a successful general counsel or legal head in his industry, McMorrow replied, ‘First, the ability to identify the issues that add the most value to the company and organise cross-functional teams to address those issues using a project management approach. Second, the ability to quickly switch gears between topics, jurisdictions and issues, and provide proactive legal advice that gives the business the assurance that the legal team is “go-to” resource instead of a blocking department’. For aspiring in-house lawyers, McMorrow advises a policy of conscientiousness and empathy: ’Seek new experiences that are outside your comfort zone. For example, if you have a transactional background, find a way to get involved in managing litigation or volunteer to participate in a compliance investigation. It might be painful at first, but you will need to bring the full array of skills to the job as general counsel. Also, treat everyone with kindness and respect throughout your career. You never know where the next reference or referral will come from. People remember leaders that make everyone feel like an important part of the overall team’.

Matthias J. Meckert is described as ‘an excellent lawyer’ and ‘at the forefront of cooperating with outside counsel and legal tech, gender equality and inclusion’, says a nominator. Serving as head of legal, Continental Europe at PGIM Real Estate Germany, he leads a team of eight lawyers and paralegals based in Frankfurt, Munich and Luxembourg. When he first joined the business, it was in the process of restructuring its business model. ‘My role in implementing the necessary changes to support this restructuring is a major highlight in my career, and included the restructuring of a large, global open-end real estate fund and the restructuring of several European investments which were part of the legacy business’, he says. Another accomplishment is the establishment of new legal procedures for PGIM Real Estate including new legal standards and precedent documentation for real estate transactions, and supporting the business in several complex real estate transactions in Continental European jurisdictions. He also oversaw the implementation of AIFMD in Continental Europe (upgrading the existing KAG-license to a German AIFMD license, second AIFMD license in Germany). ‘Further upgrading the AIFM-operations in Luxembourg to comply with the increased regulatory scrutiny in this jurisdiction is a continuing project and challenge. Our industry is faced with constant change and new regulations which requires a lot of legal management skills’, he says. Recently, Meckert was involved in the sale of one of the operating asset management entities (AIFM) to another asset management company. In 2018, he oversaw the forward sale (approximately €400m) of Junghof Plaza, a prominent office building in Frankfurt which had been rented out to Clifford Chance as their new German headquarters. ‘The in-house legal role is becoming one that focuses not just on legal expertise, but also one’s ability to manage both people and process’, he states. ‘Specifically, managing relationships with external counsel as well as alternate service providers is becoming particularly important. Our internal clients, and our company generally, expect us to approach our legal responsibilities as effectively and efficiently as possible. Managing a growing portfolio of options, including LegalTech, has become increasingly important. Regulatory changes have been a challenge for years – now, combined with political risks and populist developments, they are much more important to monitor and manage as they may become a real threat to any business’, he continues. Inclusion and diversity are integral to Prudential’s culture. Since joining the company in Continental Europe, Meckert has similarly made this a priority, particularly related to gender equality in the legal profession and most especially in the use of outside counsel. ‘This has become a standing agenda item on feedback conversations with partner firms, raising awareness and increasing robust discussions on strategies to improve “how” and “who” manages our outside counsel work. This year, I have also requested quantitative data from outside counsel about their firm’s gender profile. Today, more than half of the graduates of law schools in Germany are female. It is our responsibility to support the changing face of the legal profession, both as a diversity strategy but moreover, to support emerging talent. Speaking about and standing up for gender equality to attract and retain talent is an area of focus in which I am increasingly proud of’, Meckert says.

Kai Mielke takes on an expansive and mission-critical set of responsibilities for Konica Minolta, being head of both the legal shared services unit – which takes care of the legal needs of the European Parent Company and legal support of all 28 European subsidiaries of Konica Minolta – and disciplinary supervisor of the company’s data protection team. Mielke has a number of particular in-house highlights to elaborates on just some of these. ‘The support of several company acquisitions, both local and abroad, and internal cross border mergers and restructuring measures improved and sharpened my abilities regarding project management and efficient team work’, he explains. ‘Taking over the responsibility for Konica Minolta’s European legal team gave me the chance to implement a law firm-like working style and culture’, Mielke goes on, ‘characterised in a functional segregation of duties, a high level of freedom and responsibility of the individual team members and a strong hands-on-mentality’. Mielke is proud of the positive effect he has had on the Konica Minolta legal function: ‘I think, I have improved the service culture and hands-on-mentality of the legal department. When I took over the department, my first measure was to repeal a policy which provided certain pre-conditions and processes for the involvement of the legal department in predefined issues. Nowadays there are no hurdles, no restrictions and no predefined issues. We see ourselves – and I think, we really are – an easily accessible full service provider for the whole company. And due to the functional assignment and distribution of certain competence areas our legal team members are closer related and much more associated with their internal clients than they have been before’.

‘The in-house lawyer needs to understand the business and – especially in the tech industry – the technology of the business much deeper than ten years before or even than today’, says group general counsel and global head of M&A of Otto Group Martin Mildner when discussing what the successful future in-house counsel should be. ‘He has to transform his answers on legal problems concerning operational issues in a way that his business partners are convinced that the in-house lawyer is not only stressing the legal issue and why the project is not working, but that the in-house lawyer understands the business problem and knows how to develop a workable product’. His approximately 12-years with the Otto Group have seen him oversee a number of strategically important initiatives at the company. ‘The Otto group is probably the only international group in the online eCommerce business which were able during the last 15 years to transform its business from a pure analogue catalogue and retail business to one of the biggest digital eCommerce groups in the world’, he explains, ‘and to be able to serve other eCommerce player’s clients with nearly all financial and logistic services which an ecommerce retailer needs in the eCommerce-ecosystem’. The digital transformation of the company has, therefore, been a major focus of his work alongside the Otto Group executive board. Mildner is extremely pleased with the results of his work to organise the Otto Group legal team as well: ‘It was my clear goal from the beginning of my work within the Otto Group to transform not only the organisational structure of the legal department but also the mind-set of our in-house lawyers to a highly specialist department. This means that today our in-house lawyers are solely responsible for legal topics where they have a deep experience rather than handling every legal topic which comes to their desk’. When discussing project work, Mildner recalls the investment of the Bestseller Group in About You as one of the start-up-companies of the Otto Group with a valuation above $1bn in 2018 and the series of financial bonds that the Otto Group has issued, such as a hybrid bond of €300m in 2017-18 and the first green bond of a non-rated and non-listed issuer to the tune of €250m in 2019 as being major projects.

Matthias Möhle’s highly impressive in-house legal career included leadership roles with Deutsche Bahn, Solar Millennium and OSRAM before joining VDM Metals as group general counsel in 2016. Looking back on some of his achievements in prior roles, his work on ‘active buy-side M&A, including responsibility for post-merger litigation and post-merger integration of the international legal team’ with Deutsche Bahn as well as the IPO of OSRAM and the later group separation ‘leading to the creation of LEDVANCE OSRAM work environment through restructuring and insolvency’ with Solar Millenium, both stand out as particularly rewarding chapters. Möhle is currently relishing the variety of his role with VDM, with additional responsibilities for compliance, risk management and insurance providing a fertile environment for him to display his skills alongside core legal work ranging from competition to finance and from litigation to general commercial law.

Tim Montag began his in-house legal career in 2013 by joining European HEG (Host Europe Group) and later became the head of legal department in 2017. Shortly after, Host Europe was acquired by US-based GoDaddy. Leading a team of three people, he is now responsible for GoDaddy’s German, French, Swiss and Norwegian entities, while also playing a supporting role for other European countries. In his in-house career, Montag has assisted with several M&A transactions, including short notice acquisitions as well as two sales of the business between private equity investors, where he gathered hundreds and thousands of documents (which can be as old as the inception of the company in 1997) on short notice, giving him ‘a great understanding of how the company evolved and operates’, he says. He has also rolled out GDPR compliant behaviour across all of European companies and brands, as well as educated employees on the importance of data protection and security. During his time in current role, ‘we integrated all of our processes into the existing ones of our US-based company, which meant we had to change our way of working a lot. However, such drastic steps allowed us to keep up with the rising pace and be prepared for the challenges ahead’, he says. More generally, ‘over the last years, we have transformed from a legal department who takes care of “their own legal stuff” to a service function for the whole business. We aim to enhance existing processes while also setting up new ideas in a way that is both commercially interesting and legally compliant from the very beginning’, he continues. Montag thinks ‘legal departments need to become more of a service department for the whole business. We started with this a while back and have had huge success. Legal is included in all major developments and can help make the business compliant. While at first this was a learning experience for the whole company, the other departments gradually understood that the legal function adds value to their work and including the legal department is beneficial for everyone. I believe more businesses will see this trend in the future and that legal departments will continue to evolve from being solely responsible for their own tasks to helping everyone involved and getting the best out of their work’.

Dr Benno Quade started his employment with Software AG in 2012, as corporate counsel, before he assumed the role of senior vice president global legal and general counsel heading the global legal department, IP and technology alliances at the company. His recent work highlights the central role he plays in company projects: ‘In Q4 2018, the strategy refresh project was assigned to me and I managed the Strategy Refresh Project of Software AG, called Helix, successfully’. He has also made his mark on the company’s digitalisation initiatives: ‘Working on the design and setup of a complex IoT-Joint Venture with four Machinery Companies called ADAMOS was a main highlights due to gaining experience of the power of digital collaboration.’ He explains, ‘the same goes for my digital legal department strategy and the development of more than 20 legal apps. I learnt that creativity can help a legal department not only to scale, but also to substantially transform the internal and external perception. We have implemented a consistent and comprehensive digital legal strategy and have transformed the legal function into a role model of digitalisation. Since then, we own data as legal department and can offer full transparency on processes, SLAs and other areas. This has motivated other departments to digitalise as well’. Someone who is enthusiastic about the benefits of in-house counsel to their companies, Dr Quade concludes succinctly that ‘lawyers can do more than legal’.

After five years in private practice with Noerr in Poland and Germany, Barbara Radon moved in-house with fintech startup Spotcap before joining zeotap in 2018. She possesses academic knowledge through her status as an LLM graduate and PhD candidate as well as extensive language experience. ‘I speak Polish, English, German, Italian, Spanish and some Russian’, she explains, which she utilises in her legal role. She has drafted and negotiated software-as-a-service agreements both in her previous and current roles – a a fintech company and an adtech company – and lists this work alongside her adaptation towards the new legal realities provided by GDPR and other regulatory developments as among her best achievements. ‘I believe that the legal department now gets involved in a wider range of topics and at an earlier stage, which increases the efficiency for the company as a whole’, Radon says of her legal department. ‘For example, we finalised the templates for zeotap’s various products, which smooths out the work of sales and commercial teams. In addition, we coordinate preparing patent applications with our inventors and external patent attorneys, which makes the process more effective’. Radon is keen to support the lawyers around her: ‘I think that the most important for any legal team is that the legal team functions very well as a whole. Therefore, I would like to acknowledge here my team member, Iole Neviani, who is one of the most brilliant lawyers I have ever met. She is a great specialist, has excellent legal knowledge, perfect soft-skills and a great understanding of the product and business needs’.

Markus Ratz proved his organisational and leadership skills with his construction of UBS’s multi-national legal transactions EMEA and CH legal team which is based across Germany, Switzerland and – temporarily – the UK. The aligned approach he took to this and the success he had with this counts as among his major career highlights, as does his ‘being instrumental in the financial crisis to help the business ensuring compliance with its regulatory duties’. More recently, he has continued to evolve the way legal matters are internally handled both in his team and in the wider bank. ‘By empowering the business to take over certain tasks with low legal risk independently by providing templates, check-lists and other resources, we have freed up resources in the legal function for use on high-profile tasks. In addition, we have been supporting flexible working arrangements in the team as one increasingly important aspect of being an attractive employer’. Going forward, Ratz sees a continuation of the cost pressures on in-house legal teams and an ever-expanding regulatory environment. ‘In-house counsel will also need to ensure that the function is continued to be seen as a trusted and respected advisor to the business’, he concludes.

Dr Christian Rau has been the chief compliance officer at Olympus since October 2018, having previously served as general counsel EMEA and Latin America at DaVita, where he built, shaped and developed a legal department from scratch in a start-up like environment, recruiting and developing 10 lawyers in five countries and three continents. Prior to that, he worked as vice president and assistant general counsel at Johnson & Johnson, where he was called on to serve on the management board of an international subsidiary, ‘broadening my business acumen and my leadership and management skills’, he says. Despite a short time in his current position, Dr Rau has successfully completed a range of tasks, including conducting a robust review of risks, competencies and functions, achieving a closer cooperation between two separate functions – governance, and compliance and legal. He has integrated privacy and data protection into the broader governance and compliance team, as well as developing the coordination and cooperation between EMEA headquarters in Hamburg and eight sub-regions across EMEA. A highly praised legal professional, Dr Rau has been involved in a number of high profile transactions during the past few years. For example, he advised on and helped facilitate DaVita’s market entry into the challenging Brazilian dialysis market in 2016, accompanying closely the acquisitions of dialysis clinics and helping a quick market penetration with more than 20 clinics, serving more than 4,000 patients across the country. Talking about how he sees the in-house legal role evolving over the next few years, he comments: ‘Machine learning and artificial intelligence will require new strategies and new tools for the in-house legal profession. Also, like law firms, in-house lawyers will have to focus even more on high-growth and high-risk type of work. In addition, digitisation, data protection and cybersecurity will have to be strategically and intellectually combined as areas in which challenges lie, but also opportunities to positively differentiate one legal department from another’.

Having been serving as general counsel at eyeo since 2014, Kai Recke’s in-house legal career started at Sedo, a start-up in Cologne where he built up the legal department from scratch. After eight years at Sedo, he was asked by one of the founders of Sedo to join his new company eyeo, whose main product is the Adlock Plus software. ‘The decision to accept this offer started another exciting and challenging time in my life and I am proud to be a small part of an ongoing revolution in the way internet-users are able to determine how their privacy and browsing experience should be and that this cannot be forced on them by third parties’, he says. Apart from his role at eyeo, Recke is also actively engaged in various pro bono work, such as BUJ.net and a regional lawyers association. According to Recke, ‘in-house legal counsel will continue to be an important advisor to the board and should be involved in the decision making process early. For that, you need to be able to understand the business aspects of decisions and the risks that are associated. In-house lawyers need to be digital experts and keep up with the global digitisation if they want to stay relevant’, he comments.

Having joined DEGES in 2009 as the head of legal department, Martin Regnath was later promoted to general counsel and authorised signatory in 2011. Since then, he has successfully built up his team, which now consists of 70 highly qualified individuals. Commenting on one of his career highlights, Regnath says, ‘When I started with DEGES, my team had the traditional role of a legal department. Our operative functions did their business and if anything went wrong, they asked us for help. During the years our role has completely changed. Nowadays, we are involved in the company’s projects from the beginning’. He has also established a culture of collaboration where ‘we trust each other and encourage each other to do independent and high quality work whilst sharing knowledge and experience with the whole team’. During his time in his current role, ‘we have reviewed our work methods, processes and structures. Where possible and necessary, we have adjusted, modified and reorganised workflows to enable agile work within the company. Furthermore, the processes have been defined with regard to scalability. They are meant to ensure decentralised work while maintaining the quality typical of our company’, Regnath states. ‘I want the legal division to be an innovation driver in the company supporting digitalisation and providing legal support for any new ideas to improve our company’s work’, he further comments. In addition to his in-house role, Regnath is also the founder and head of the expert group “Construction and Real Estate Law” within the “Bundesverband der Unternehmensjuristen (BUJ)”, which is Germany’s largest independent advocacy group for in-house lawyers.

Since March 2019, Sivantos Group has been part of WS Audiology, a company formed through the combination of Singapore headquartered Sivantos and Denmark based Widex. Tobias Reiter joined Sivantos Group in 2018 and assumed his current position as director legal in April 2019. Previously, he was head of legal EMEA at the German subsidiary of the Canadian component manufacturer Future Electronics. With a track record of negotiating, drafting and managing a wide variety of contract types, Reiter supports both internal as well as external clients in IT, distribution and now the medical devices industry. He has a deep understanding of technology and is experienced in managing international teams and external counsel.

Hartmut T. Renz is the head of compliance at Citigroup Global Markets Europe, Frankfurt, responsible for monitoring the compliance programme for all Citi activities within Germany, including legal entities and branches. He ensures the application of global guidelines, standards and processes as well as appropriate supplements and supplementary procedures established to comply with applicable laws and regulations. In his current role, Renz has successfully improved the team’s communication skills and implemented a compliance culture that’s more process and technology oriented, making sure business units can get faster guidance on potential compliance risks. Prior to Citi, Renz served as group chief compliance officer at LBBW where he was recognised for his excellent work in a complex regulatory environment the bank operates in. In addition to his position at Citi, Renz often holds seminars in the field of capital market law and security transactions and regularly publishes articles on the subject. He is also a lecturer at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management for the “Certified Compliance Professional Programs (CCP)” as well as at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland for the “Executive Master of Business Law Program (M.B.L.)”. According to Renz, ‘compliance roles should be more proactive to always stay ahead of the (regulatory) curve and therefore provide sufficient guidance in advance to mitigate compliance risks’.

Ströer is a leading German provider of out-of-home media and offers advertising customers individualised and fully integrated, end-to-end solutions along the entire marketing and sales value chain. Its head of legal, digital is Dr Christian Ronge, who started at Allen & Overy working on numerous M&A and corporate matters. He then moved in-house to join E.ON’s legal department as senior associate to advise on the spin-off of the power generation and trading business to new company Uniper. In early 2018, he joined Ströer to get deeper into digital and media business, assuming more responsibility for team and organisation. ‘I see the major challenge for lawyers in general and in-house lawyers in particular is “cutting through complexity“. To differentiate between the levels of materiality, automate repetitive tasks and allocate resources wisely is key’, he says. Following the research for the GC Powerlist Germany 2019, Dr Ronge moved to Scout24 Group as general counsel.

As one of the world’s most international construction service providers, HOCHTIEF has been in business for over 140 years. Dr Holger Kirsten Rosenbauer joined the company in 2009 and is currently serving as legal operations manager, senior legal counsel and director of HOCHTIEF Trade Solutions. A highly praised legal professional, Rosenbauer has handled a number of significant projects in the past 12 months: including the divesture of Hochtief crane rental business to a strategic investor; sale of Hochtief hydro-electrical power project company in Chile; purchase of outstanding stake in Skyliving KG (the developer of the luxury apartments in Hamburg’s newly erected landmark Elbphilharmony); corporate re-organisations within Hochtief Europe with internal share and asset deals; as well as providing support to winning PPP projects for transportation infrastructures in the Benelux. In addition, ‘in my role as a member of the roundtable digitalisation@HOCHTIEF and member of the payment compliance board, I take part in driving technological progress in the legal departments of Hochtief, as well as of the business culture within Hochtief. As legal operations manager, I take care of the efficient use of the legal department’s personal resources’, he says.

A part of RWE since 2001 when he joined as corporate counsel, Dr Ulrich Rust has risen steadily through the ranks of the company since then, and brings unparalleled knowledge of legal issues related to the German electricity network to his role. Prior to his current role as general counsel and head of legal, he went through the roles of head of competition and energy law, deputy general counsel of RWE, general counsel and chief compliance officer of RWE Generation, and has thus built up an encyclopaedic knowledge of the company’s operations. Dr Rust reminisces about some of his major achievements with the company, which have included involvement in some of the major sea changes in the German energy sector: ‘A true highlight of my earlier days with RWE was the intensive regulatory debate on energy market liberalisation and alleged market dominance, which put RWE and other incumbents under significant pressure by competition authorities. Having been in charge for competition and energy law back then, it was for me a key task to organise our group-wide corporate defence and to dig into the very details of energy markets and internal operations. Another highlight with significant legal and regulatory impact is the on-going energy transition both in Germany and in Europe which put enormous pressure on the market participants and RWE in particular. The nuclear phase-out and ongoing decarbonisation debate requires the highest attention from a legal perspective, be it negotiations with government, preparing for complex litigations or compliance with the fiduciary duties of top management’. In terms of deals, Dr Rust continues that ‘the RWE-EON deal signed in 2018 and to be implemented over the course of 2019 was without a doubt the most important M&A transaction to make it onto my desk’.

Standing for Home Shopping Europe, HSE24 is a teleshopping broadcaster currently offering a 24-hour programme on three channels. Guenther Sailer serves as its general counsel and executive vice president legal and compliance, having joined the company in 2017. He regards the top three highlights of his in-house career as: ‘Establishing state of the art compliance systems, developing high performance legal teams, and [handling] several M&A projects as well as multi-million dollar arbitration proceedings’, he states. During his time in his current position, Sailer has successfully developed a high performance legal team and ‘my role will transform more to a business role focusing on leadership’, he says.

The growth of solar power’s importance in meeting global energy demands seems destined to increase rapidly in coming years, and Sybac Solar’s general counsel Konstantin Sassen has been a legal expert in the market since joining the company in 2011. As well as amassing a vast array of knowledge of the solar power sector, he has been a central component of the company’s business endeavours as well: ‘Since 2011 my legal work has grown into the international market, as during the past eight years the company has expanded its business internationally into locations including North and South America, United Kingdom, Japan, China, Australia and other locations. Simultaneous to this international expansion, the company became highly active in increasing its business presence in Germany, which required an increased participation and responses in bid tendering. With a continuingly changing business landscape, it became imperative for the Sybac Solar Group to recognise and quickly respond to new business opportunities that were outside the existing business framework. Accordingly, I directed the company into an expansion in the area of commercial real estate project development. This was a logical direction for the Sybac Solar Group, given that the existing resources and strengths of the company could easily transition into this new business opportunity’. More recently, among his main achievements has been the development of a new real estate project development team led by the legal department. This team’s recent sales include the Wohnpark Südkreuz Berlin and New City Bedburg developments, ‘each of these two projects had an investment value of approximately €200-250m’. Sassen also sees an increasingly prominent role for in-house lawyers in Germany: ‘I anticipate that a traditional corporate lawyer’s role and understanding is already changing rapidly and will change even more rapidly in the coming few years. The distinction of corporate lawyers in the common understanding on one side and in-house lawyers on the other side will gradually shift to a broader category of “business lawyers”, which can include both in-house and outside counsel. This, I believe, will bring with it a required permeability of tasks and work within an entity’s legal team, which would also provide a welcomed increase in the quality of advice available to the entity’.

Florian Schaefer joined Leica Camera in 2008 acting as general counsel of the company’s headquarters and its subsidiaries across the globe in over 20 jurisdictions. He has a broad array of responsibilities including the overseeing of M&As, the company’s IP portfolio, research and development, compliance, and corporate governance among other important tasks. These years have led him to a full immersion into the business and allowed him to gain immense experience of the Leica legal function, positioning him as a pragmatic and commercially-minded solution provider that takes into account the demands and targets of the business units while incorporating these in the solutions presented. In particular, the comprehensive data base of templates available for other business units on the legal and compliance page in Leica’s intranet. Schaefer’s stewardship of the Leica legal team has been remarked upon, and he now oversees a six-member team covering different jurisdictions and specialising in all relevant legal areas, which also emphasises diversity and inclusion and empowerment of the different characters within the team. On legal tech he has also been recognised as one of the leaders of the revolution 4.0 within legal departments as he has been running a completely digital office since 2012; with the implementation of a comprehensive document management system, that enables an objective continuance of the workflow and increases the communication and transparency within the team. Hence, Schaefer is a reference within the in-house community when explaining the advantages that cutting edge technology can provide to multiply the ability of the legal team both collectively and individually.

Manfred Schick joined ING Germany in September 2004 as the general counsel and head of the legal department and board office. Before that he worked at an independent and international law firm covering M&A transactions, corporate law, banking supervisory law and restructuring. Talking about his in-house career highlights which defined him as a legal professional, Schick states: ‘The first can best be described as a takeaway from the acquisition of a mortgage loan portfolio from Hypo Real Estate Bank in 2007. During the due diligence and contract negotiations we flagged the legal risk of insolvency of the seller. During that time an insolvency of a bank was still unthinkable and we received heavy headwind for bringing that topic to the table. We looked into our reasoning but maintained our point. A few months later the financial crises proved us right in our diligent approach. My learning was to stick with a well-founded opinion and not to falter when you face head wind’. During his time in his current role, Schick introduced the change in the professional self-conception of the legal department: ‘the legal department is not a self-sufficient function in an ivory tower, but an internal service provider and employees of other departments seeking our support are our clients. This new approach changed how the legal department was perceived in the bank, from a hurdle to a business enabler and guardian. As a service provider, the legal department needs to add value to the business departments and make that added value transparent’, he says. In the past three years, Schick and his legal team have been involved in important transactions and litigations. With significant contribution from the legal function, in 2018 ING acquired the Lendico group, a digital SME finance provider with companies in Germany, Poland, Spain and the Netherlands. The acquisition was completed under tight time pressure but the legal work did not finish with the signing or closing. The successful integration required sophisticated legal advice. Further, due to the in-depth knowledge and understanding of the Lendico business and structure, the legal department helped bridge the cultural gap between a Fintech and a major financial institution. ‘Currently I am leading the legal department through the biggest reorganisation the bank has ever seen. The agile transformation of the bank and the legal department itself rattles at the foundations of the previous organisations and goes beyond a new structure chart. It aims not only at a lean and more versatile structure but at a cultural change of the mind-set of the people. To break down silo structures and adapt new working methods, like (electronic) Kanban boards, design thinking and a Legal Obeya Room, while at the same time ensuring constant and consistent regulatory compliance and supporting a sustainable and secure business growth is the biggest task of these days’, Schick comments.

‘Andreas Schillack, head of legal for Sandoz Europe’, a nominating source writes, ‘covers all aspects of pharma in-house legal counselling, leveraging upon his more than 20 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry. His company has been the only pharmaceutical company that has reacted with a long-term strategy to tender procedures of public health funds as well as successful legal defence in cases of claims arising within tender proceedings’. This quote provides insight into the excellent reputation enjoyed by Schillack and his senior leadership. There are also mentioned a number of successful projects Schillack has been involved in over the past years, listing these as ‘defense against product liability claims, several German and European business development, licensing and divestiture deals, successful product launches, unfair competition proceedings, market access and pricing and reimbursement proceedings for pharmaceutical products, and legal compliance initiatives’. Feeding into this excellent record, Schillack provides for a productive internal atmosphere, spirit of collaboration and trust, as well as a European subject matter expert and work stream matrix structure. This drives forward both the European legal team’s exchange and proactive, pragmatic support to business functions. All this has been in conjunction with a comprehensive global transformation and the implementation of several knowledge-sharing tools as part of a digital expansion.

Olaf Schneider is the general counsel, chief compliance officer and corporate secretary of leading European engineering and services group Bilfinger, which is a stock listed company with nearly 40,000 employees that offers customised services for industrial facilities. Prior to his current employment, Schneider served as general counsel for the industry sector of Siemens in Erlangen, and as chief compliance officer at MAN in Munich. Furthermore, he worked at GE in Frankfurt and Munich in different functions including as a member of the managing board of a group company. Schneider started his legal career with the international law firm Linklaters in Frankfurt, completed his legal education at the University of Bonn and served his mandatory legal clerkship in Cologne. He also holds a Master of Laws from University College London, UK.

Starting in 1998 with SAP as a legal counsel, Jochen Scholten headed the company’s commercial legal team as associate general counsel for several years after a number of expert roles. He was appointed general counsel for the SAP global legal function in 2017. Speaking on his experiences with the company, Scholten lists a number of his accomplishments: ‘I was able to handle a large variety of topics in different legal subject areas which provided me with a solid foundation for managing a global team with different responsibilities. In addition I had the opportunity to handle trans-jurisdictional topics and to get to take an end-to-end view on business matters’. Over time, Scholten sees in-house counsel as having to master an ever-increasing variety of subject areas. ‘The regulatory framework gets more complex, and business models, too’, he explains. ‘This leads to a situation where in-house counsel more and more have to orchestrate a large variety of topics and need to consider things that evolve on a fast track’.

With 17 years of legal experience in the banking industry, Frederick Schönig joined Aareal Bank in 2007 and has been serving as head of transactional legal since 2013. He is currently in charge of managing a team of 15 international in-house lawyers who oversee all legal aspects of Aareal’s international property finance transactions. Schönig started his career in the banking and finance practice group of Ashurst in Frankfurt and London before moving in-house. Talking about his time at private practice, Schönig says: ‘During my first years as a lawyer, I had a mentor who taught me to think about business and legal issues at the same time. I learned how to advise on legal matters with a view to help businesses achieve targets, which is the key to succeed as a commercial lawyer’. He regards the experience as an asset that he could then easily transform and further develop when he became an in-house lawyer. Another highlight of his legal career is the implementation of a legal spending management software at Aareal Bank, which could improve the quality of external legal services for the bank, improve the bank’s loan products, manage legal service procurement costs, as well as drive digitalisation of workflows. In his current role, Schönig has successfully established small teams specialising in different regions, as well as implemented a very progressive mobile working concept where team members can choose their workplace freely up to 50% of their working hours. ‘This underlines our mind-set of self-organisation, and team members are encouraged to make use of digital solutions to efficiently work and communicate despite remote distance’, he explains. During the last few years, Schönig’s legal team has successfully supported the financing of several high volume cross border property portfolios with loans amount up to €1bn. Commenting on the evolving in-house legal role, Schönig states, ‘The trend “from mere legal specialist to trusted advisor” will continue. Besides the risk management element, future successes of in-house counsel will be benchmarked against the added value they bring to the business. Digital skills will become crucial, to increase quality of the legal services and business support and to stay cost efficient at the same time. Legal workflows will be split up into lower value parts which are easily open to digitalisation and higher value parts which will be dealt with by human brains for the time being. We will have to encourage law firms to rethink pricing models and digitalisation for themselves’.

Douglas is the leading premium beauty retailer in the European beauty industry with about 2,400 stores and fast-growing online platforms in 26 European countries. Having joined the company in 2014, Johannes Schulte serves as general counsel at Douglas Holding, after working as general counsel at Unify for four years. Before moving in-house, Schulte was a partner at Hogan Lovells for nine years. A highly capable legal professional, he provides expert legal advice on a range of matters and is involved in all major deals of the business. For instance, in 2018, Douglas acquired a majority stake in German beauty retailer Parfümerie Akzente with its successful online shop parfumdreams from owner family Renchen, strengthening its German and European e-commerce business.

Daniel Schulz has served as the head of the legal department at Serviceplan, a global market leading integrated communications company, for over six years, and possesses great skill and knowledge of media law, IP and in-house legal management. In September 2019, Service plan launched a long term image campaign for its client AOK-Bundesverband, a public healthcare insurer in Germany. Its launch was the culmination of a long process of hard work from which the legal affairs was handled by Schulz. In August 2019, Serviceplan won the bid from Vorwerk Group to manage its brand strategy globally, led by the centrally integrated Munich office of Serviceplan. The bidding process was protracted and Schulz’s legal department was heavily involved in its legal matters.

For over six years, Christian Seidel has served as the general counsel for German DIY-store chain, HORNBACH Baumarkt, a publicly traded home improvement retailer with a turnover of over €4bn, and subsidiaries present in nine countries. Prior to joining HORNBACH, Seidel led the legal department of leading wholesale company, METRO, as the regional general counsel. In this role he coordinated the legal departments of a sales line in several countries, advising on all major legal issues. Seidel started his career at law firm CMS where he advised business clients in the areas of commercial, IP and IT law as well as litigation.

Vallourec is the world leader in premium tubular solutions primarily serving energy markets (oil and gas, powergen). With over 19,000 employees, integrated manufacturing facilities, advanced R&D and a presence in more than 20 countries, Vallourec offers its customers innovative global solutions to meet the energy challenges of the 21st century. Tijen Sensebat has nearly 20 years of experience in legal and compliance departments of the automotive and steel industries as well as medical technology. In her current position as general counsel Europe Africa at the Vallourec Group, she is responsible for the strategic-legal orientation of a global market leader in premium pipe solutions, which primarily serve energy markets and industrial applications.

One of Europe’s leading sugar producers, Pfeifer & Langen has always afforded its business units and the individuals within these a high degree of autonomy based on a strong company culture favouring trust, subsidiarity and entrepreneurial spirit. Building on this, general counsel and chief compliance officer Ramon Sieveking has been working on constructing a comprehensive new compliance programme globally to allow best practices to be kept to while maintaining this flexible approach. ‘This is helping our group of companies to weather the dramatic changes to the sugar sector resulting from the abolishing of most elements of the EU sugar market regulations effective since October 2017’, Sieveking explains. When recalling his overall career with Pfeifer & Langen, Sieveking emphasises the key role that problem-solving will always have in building a top-quality in-house counsel: ‘The almost 13 years that I spent at the group legal department of Metro allowed me to experience a large variety of jurisdictions and cultures and helped me to learn adapting to different environments while always maintaining my legal and compliance compass. This time taught me also that conflicting or not fully clarified areas in the legal field have their charm and lawyers and in-house counsel should learn to manage their emotions when facing issues that are not 100% clear cut. These issues do not only infer risks but also offer opportunities’. The company is currently undergoing a modernisation programme which will see it overhaul almost all internal processes. ‘Against this background, we have implemented a continuous discussion process within the legal and compliance team on vision, mission and on how to balance the (obviously partly conflicting) expectations of different internal and external stakeholders. Overall, we are supporting the modernisation process by establishing or strengthening legal touchpoints in all business processes’, explains Sieveking.

Christian Sommer has been heavily involved in updating the way in which projects are supported within the Vodafone Group in recent months, with this endeavour ranking among his most strategically important actions on behalf of the team in that time: ‘The introduction of a triaging system supporting agile projects has completely changed the way in-house legal support is provided in certain areas. This has changed the way I approach legal support for complex IT transformation projects completely. In addition, the introduction and continuous growth of a near-shore legal shared service centre team has proved instrumental in helping Vodafone to deal with several thousand commercial agreements in an efficient and effective way’. Sommer believes that digitalisation will cause a revolution in in-house legal affairs going forward. ‘The in-house role will undergo a seismic shift over the next five to ten years’, he says. ‘The introduction of AI and machine learning will fundamentally change the role of the commercial legal in-house support needed, not just in terms of numbers of lawyers but also relating to the kind of support. The skills needed to be a successful in-house legal expert will differ from what is needed now quite a bit. Tech understanding will become a must-have skill rather than a luxury. Contract negotiations will become automated processes (in certain areas) using IT platforms with no legal support needed anymore.

A globally experienced and commercially minded general counsel, Spitzer provides pragmatic and results-driven advice on cross-border transactions with Santander’s multinational corporate customers headquartered in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and their subsidiaries worldwide. Recent experience includes advising Santander as an active book runner for Henkel, the first German company to conclude a syndicated ‘Green Loan’. Spitzer achieved many significant accolades in 2019, in particular the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Award for Global General Commercial Individual of the Year in New York City and the ACC European Counsel Award in the same category in London, each based on over 4,000 global nominations and peer feedback. These prestigious trophies recognize Spitzer’s outstanding legal and communication skills, efficiency, commercial awareness and leadership excellence across geographies. As the only invitee from Continental Europe, Spitzer spoke at The Legal500’s Enterprise GC event in London on corporate sustainability and legal innovation. Other performances at important gatherings included addressing over 100 international general counsel at a summit in Spain, and talking about leadership with integrity at the International Bar Association Digital Operations conference. Spitzer also returned to Harvard Law School to present his second lecture following his 2018 talk on international sanction provisions, this time speaking about sustainable leadership in a highly regulated and tech-reliant environment. Harvard Business Law Review will publish his corresponding article, which the editors ‘firmly believe adds significant value to the field’. Spitzer continues lecturing as an adjunct professor at the Frankfurt Institute for Law and Finance in one of the global Top 10 LL.M. programs on banking and securities law as recognized by LL.M. Guide. He is also an avid advocate for the next generation of female leaders, e.g., by assisting WFA in Madrid to empower women to grow up with strong values and confidence. Furthermore, Spitzer is the Chairman of The Legal 500 GC Powerlist Germany advisory board as well as an advisory board member of Business Law Magazine, published by Frankfurt Business Media, the specialist publisher of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and of the German Institute for Legal Departments and Corporate Lawyers (diruj). Spitzer is more than just the leader of the bank’s legal department. He possesses a unique skill set for any lawyer, having formerly spent many years in private practice and working for international financial institutions around the globe. He fully integrates his work with Santander’s business teams in order to mitigate commercial and reputational risk and achieve all parties’ objectives in a legally and ethically sound manner. Spitzer’s vision of the general counsel as an integral part of senior management is extremely relevant, as only a strong and independent leader can successfully tackle the challenges of today’s corporate realities. Summing up, Timo Spitzer embodies the modern, truly global counsel who, in addition to serving his internal clients, acts as a positive force for wider society. He is very highly regarded as a thought leader in the international legal, business and academic communities.

Headquartered in Berlin, Bombardier Transportation is one of the world’s largest companies in the rail vehicle and equipment manufacturing and servicing industry. Its head of group corporate, M&A and legal affairs is Dr Alexander Steinbrecher, who joined the legal team of Bombardier Transportation as legal counsel after legal studies in both Germany (bar exam and Dr jur.) and the US (LLM). Since then he has progressed in the corporation and was promoted to his current global and strategic role in January 2018, taking on more responsibilities in the commercial matters of the business, such as dealing with complex negotiations and taking on board positions of group companies. Commenting on his current role, Dr Steinbrecher says, ‘Advising the business in corporate affairs, indirect procurement and legal affairs including antitrust and other regulatory matters complements my skill-set of an operational in-house lawyer. And working on M&A transactions and outsourcing projects in various jurisdictions is a big challenge, a lot of work and highly rewarding, if the deals get done. It has been a great learning and development for me, both as an in-house lawyer and corporate professional’. In addition, Dr Steinbrecher has been lecturing at the European University Viadrina School of Law in Germany in the areas of commercial conflict management (since 2004), arbitration law and practice (since 2017) and corporate dispute resolution (since 2019). Since 2017, he has also been acting as an “of counsel” at a dispute resolution boutique law firm. As head of group corporate, M&A and legal affairs, Dr Steinbrecher has put strong emphasis on the personal and professional development of his legal team, established a ‘can do’ attitude in the team where the focus is on problem solving and not legal opinions, and created transparency within the legal team. He has also measured the commercial impact of their legal work and has been vocal about it in the organisation. In 2019, Dr Steinbrecher co-founded the Roundtable Innovation & Legal Tech to foster the innovation and advancement of in-house legal teams of Germany companies. ‘I regularly publish and speak about legal innovation and legal tech in Germany’, he says. Talking about his view on the evolving in-house legal role over the next few years, Dr Steinbrecher states, ‘Within the next years, in-house legal teams will diversify (less lawyers, more paralegals, knowledge and project managers and shared service teams). We will have changed our output: from legal mails, memos and PowerPoint to digital process design that embeds the law and provides self-service access for non-lawyers (legal apps, contract generators and work-flow or process software). We will have more time for legal brain work and strategic advice as we outsource legal legwork to off-shore (alternate) legal service providers. Legal spend to external law firms will thereby decrease and the insourcing of legal work will continue. Alternative billing will be the norm and not the exception because legal services will become commodities with a price tag where law firms will be disrupted by advisory firms (the big four) and (alternate) legal service providers. The legal profession will be disrupted similar to the banking profession. What fin-tech has been doing to banking will be similar to what legal-tech will be doing to lawyering’.

Manuel Sternisa has been a fixture of the MediaMarktSaturn Retail Group legal team since 2001 and took his first leadership role in 2007. The past year has been a momentous one for Sternisa, as October 2018 saw him made general counsel of the Group, leading the central legal affairs team with approximately 30 individuals based at the Group’s Ingolstadt headquarters. His own abilities have grown along with the MediaMarktSaturn Retail Group legal teams, and he charts some of the major milestones of his 18-year journey: ‘Early in my career I created the legal structure, drafted the necessary contracts and implemented a respective product liability management system for our own brand company importing private label goods from Asian. This project taught me to think and to feel like an entrepreneur. Beginning from 2008 I was in charge of multiple investigations including dawn raids conducted by national cartel authorities and the EU Commission. These cases visualised the key role of an in-house counsel as a fire fighter and a trusted adviser at the same time. In 2017 we built up a purchase cooperation with our French competitor called European Retail Alliance. Very soon it became clear that the legal function is the central hub for realising such big projects’. Since taking on the general counsel role, Sternisa has deployed a number of new technologies and techniques to take the team’s legal support to a new level. ‘By setting up a legal tech project as the first step we analysed our internal processes regarding content, effort, clients, and impact’, Sternisa explains. ‘Meanwhile there are legal sub teams using agile working methods, and we try to increase the permeability between the single sub teams by job rotation, matrix responsibilities, and more. This should pay out in perform the legal services for the increasing complexity of the tasks in the digital world with the same or even less budget’.

Beginning his career in an external law firm, Jan Thöle made his move to in-house legal work in 2009 and has been engaged in M&A transactions in the renewables energy sector as well as a private equity business before taking on his current role as general counsel for holding company Mutares; in 2016. He has been engaged in a number of important acquisitions of Mutares, 2016 saw it acquire Balcke-Dürr group from SPX, while 2017 saw it taking over Donges SteelTec from Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems Europe, both investments followed by numerous add-on aquitisions including the latest acquisition of the building systems division of Finnish Ruukki Construction, a subsidiary of SSAB Group. Following its entry into the UK market in 2018 due to the acquisition of Knorr-Bremse RailServices UK and Kiepe Electric, Mutares increased its speed in acquisitions and 2019 saw seven transactions, a significant part of it done without involvement of external law firms in-house. This portfolio of transactions show Thöle to be adept at supporting cross-border transactions across a variety of industries.

General counsel for DDB Group since 2010 and managing director (COO) for Lemon Group Services, the shared services centre for the DDB Group, since 2015, Christian Unsinn’s dual role provides ample opportunity for him to showcase his extremely impressive skillset: ‘As part of the Omnicom group, DDB needs to comply with Omnicom's standards, and also needs to co-operate with other international agencies of the DDB and Omnicom networks. Due to these co-operations, I have gained deeper knowledge on international economic and legal connections and necessities’.  Indeed, he is one of the two personalities most intimately involved in the creation of the Lemon Group Services centre, and recalls this process: ‘Starting in 2010/11 I have consolidated the legal services of the entities of the German DDB group into one legal department, which initially was not appreciated by the agencies as they felt they would lose part of their way of working independently. However, since then my legal team's services have become much appreciated amongst the group's agencies’.  Recently, he has been involved in some major group-level projects. In particular, master service agreements have been inked with one of the world’s biggest car manufacturers as well as one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of laundry & home care and beauty care products, and he has been involved in defending the company in notable litigations. Going forward, Unsinn sees an increasing focus on ‘cost-efficiency, industry 4.0, speed, complexity and attracting top talent from competitors’ as among the in-house lawyers’ main future considerations.

Praised as ‘innovative, professional and forward thinking’ as well as having ‘strong analytical skills and good sense of judgement’ by a nominator, Dr Nikolai Vokuhl is an excellent lawyer with expertise in all areas of law, particularly in the fields of commercial and corporate law. After obtaining a PhD degree while working as a research assistant at Bucerius Law School, he started to work as a corporate and securities lawyer at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer in Frankfurt after finishing his legal training. Dr Vokuhl started his in-house legal career in 2013 when he joined Amazon Germany to advise on a business line – “hardlines” which includes all electrical devices, sports gear, tools, toys, musical instruments and more – in all legal issues. ‘This included inter alia general commercial law, anti-trust law, competition law, data protection law, consumer rights, IP and IT, all fields I have not advised on before. But I was excited for the challenge and curious to learn new things and it was one of the best decisions ever (despite the natural struggles when I started). Besides, I also took care of all corporate issues for Amazon in Germany’, he comments. In June 2017, he took on the challenge of becoming the general counsel of windeln.de, a listed German e-commerce retailer for baby and children’s products (the German diapers.com). He then moved to HUGO BOSS in March 2019, leading a global team of 30 members as general counsel for the group, responsible for all legal aspects. Dr Vokuhl thinks there will be two major themes shaping the in-house legal role (and have shaped it in the past): one is the increasing complexity of the legal environment and the other one is the challenge that in-house lawyers are asked to achieve more and work on more tasks with less resources. According to Dr Vokuhl, one way to tackle those issues is digitalisation. ‘In my view, recurring standard tasks will be automated in the future, which frees up resources for in-house lawyers to focus on more complicated issues, which will also help reduce the use of outside counsel in the future. Furthermore, I think that due to the increasing complexity of legal environments and the internationality of in-house legal work, in-house legal advisors will be more and more asked to act as risk assessors and balancers (the question “what would you do” will be asked to in-house lawyers more often). This requires in-house lawyers to have a very thorough understanding of the business of its company to be able to take into account all major aspects and balance them correctly’, he says.

Beiersdorf is a German multinational company that manufactures personal-care products and pressure-sensitive adhesives. Its head of corporate legal affairs and compliance management is Eberhard von Klinggraeff who joined the company in 2001. During his long tenure at Beiersdorf, von Klinggraeff has built up the first ever international legal affairs team for the company as well as a comprehensive and group wide compliance management system. ‘I am convinced that it makes a big difference doing in-house counselling and I am a great believer in the need for legal departments to become multi-disciplinary in the coming years’, he says. During the last few years, von Klinggraeff has been involved in crucial transactions and litigation matters, including anti-trust law compensation claims, providing strong legal support to the business.

Dr Dirk Weber joined eBay Marketplaces in 2001 and has since assumed a range of senior roles within the company. Amongst these roles is that of managing director for eBay Customer support and senior legal director of compliance, commercial and product. Dr Weber currently serves as the general counsel and chairman of the supervisory board for eBay Germany. Dr Weber has recently worked on launching a more streamlined management payments process in Germany, a development that will manage the end-to-end payments process on its Marketplace platform in Germany – driving efficiencies for both buyers and sellers.

‘When studying law’, Maike Weber recalls, ‘I was not aware in-house positions like the role I have at Native Instruments even existed’. These days are far behind her, and she now oversees the daily global operations as head of legal for a leading music soft- and hardware tech company. Extremely forward-thinking in line with the rest of the company, Weber regards ‘integrating digitalisation and realising how much easier all these great new tools can make a lawyer’s life – so that even the necessary administrative work can be fun’ – as among the most enjoyable aspects of her recent time at the company, and adds that the Native Instruments legal department is among the most satisfied of the whole company based on recent survey results. Going forward, Weber believes that most in-house counsel at large companies have stopped being the traditionally pejorative stereotype of business obstructers long ago. ‘The good analytical and organisational skills of in-house counsel can now be used much better. Thanks to their good overview, in-house counsel can provide support in linking resources within the company, and the broad general know-how many in-house counsel have due to the various topics they get in touch with during their work, could support projects better the earlier the in-house counsel get involved’, Weber says.

After a number of years in private practice with Jenner & Block in Chicago and WilmerHale in Berlin, Sven Wehser joined Siemens where he enjoyed progressively broader roles in Munich, Beijing, and Erlangen in IP, licensing, M&A and business development. From here, he moved to Apple and its Asia Pacific team in Hong Kong and then Leica as general counsel and chief compliance officer. Now general counsel and business integrity officer for DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) with consumer goods giant Unilever, he takes on a myriad set of responsibilities. He is now leading the legal team in its current evolution towards being an even more agile, innovative, digital and collaborative unit than it is currently. ‘The legal team is now recognised as a key business enabler in particular in the space of digital, performance marketing and start-up collaborations’, he explains. Discussing the future of the legal profession, Wehser believes that ‘the wider legal profession is significantly behind other parts of the economy’ when it comes to harnessing technological resources available to it: ‘Legal sits on an incredibly valuable trove of data in contracts, relationships, negotiations, blogs, articles and books. Once solutions will interface with these data sets with big data analytics, machine learning and AI, the legal world will change in ways we cannot image today. Ultimately, it will disrupt the legal profession in similar ways technology disrupted other industries’.

Over the past two decades Dr Patrick Wolff undertook roles with Bayernwerk and, more notably, E.ON before moving to Uniper when it split off from E.ON’s fossil fuel entities in January 2016. His time with E.ON saw him move steadily through the ranks over a fifteen year period, eventually being made vice president at the European energy giant. His time with Uniper has been extremely rewarding as well, with his setting up of the 100-person legal department at the company ranking among his foremost career highlights. ‘In-house lawyers now get closer to business needs and have a broader view on the impact and its mitigation of legal and regulatory framework’, Dr Wolff says of his evolution of the team’s working practices since joining. In the future, Dr Wolff sees ‘taking the challenge of digitalisation to improve quality and efficiency of in-house legal support’ as among his primary objectives.

HD+ is a wholly owned subsidiary of SES, a leading global satellite operator with a fleet of over 50 satellites. As general counsel and data protection officer at HD+, Michael Zeck has a number of career highlights including providing support to the development and launch of HD+ business model for the encryption of HD Free TV channels in the German market, as well as ‘further development of the HD+ business model to include non-linear, interactive elements and complete integration in TV sets from well-known manufacturers and also through internationalisation‘, Zeck says. In his current role, Zeck has continously developed the department into an internal competence centre combined with the intelligent use of external resources and smart legal tech applications.

Deutsche Lufthansa, commonly known as Lufthansa, is the largest German airline which, when combined with its subsidiaries, is also the largest airline in Europe in terms of passengers carried. Dr Stephan Zilles is head of legal and compliance of the company, having assumed his current position in 2017. He was previously a legal counsel with Deutsche Lufthansa before moving to airline catering behemoth LSG Lufthansa Service Holding as head of legal, compliance and corporate affairs. Highly praised by his peers, Zilles is an experienced legal professional who is trusted by the business to advise on all legal and compliance matters.