Team size: 21

What are the major cases or transactions you have been involved in recently?

Our legal team has evolved from being an in-house legal team with Bestseller as the sole client to now being the in-house legal team of the entire Heartland group. Being the centralised group legal function of the Heartland Group gives us the opportunity to provide legal advice to a wide range of colleagues and companies across the Heartland Group. Our legal team is, therefore, on a day-to-day basis involved in many diverse legal issues in nature, size and complexity.

As a department we are very focused on always doing our work with the greatest possible respect and understanding of what drives the departments and business we are given the opportunity to provide legal advice to. The visions, the orderliness and the entrepreneurial spirit that dominates the initiatives that are initiated in Bestseller and in Heartland are our focus as well, and we strive to help look after and strengthen those principles in the legal work that we do.

I am driven by ensuring that we deliver best possible legal advice to our entire group, and I am always focused on legal knowledge sharing across the businesses, departments, and colleagues that we collaborate with. Always aiming to make the legal tasks and complexity easier to overcome across the different businesses in the group. This is our operating model and the reason why we last year carried out a major renewal of our existing legal platform in Bestseller, just as we established a joint legal platform with other colleagues and departments in the Heartland group – both platforms with the aim to ensure easy and fast knowledge sharing with our collaborators.

What emerging technologies do you see as having the most significant impact on the legal profession in the near future, and how do you stay updated on these developments?

In a world increasingly shaped by Artificial Intelligence and being a part of a company focussing on the opportunities of this technology, our legal team has had a continuing focus on the use of generative AI. Firstly, of defining a GenAI policy along with a set of guidelines and compliance training sessions to enable our colleagues to navigate the area of generative AI, but also on learning and exploring how we in the legal department can make generative AI a natural part of our work processes and benefit from it. We are curious to gather inspiration both inside and outside our organisation and we seek to inspire each other in our daily work and on team sessions. We are eager to learn how our work workflows can benefit from generative AI and hopefully also have a positive effect on our workload and our job satisfaction.