Team size: 15

Milestone Systems’ legal team has been on a growth journey since January 2022. The team now consists of 15 FTEs across the globe. In order to be scalable and in order to best support our organisation, the team is split into the following roles: Legal Business Partners supporting each business unit, Regional Counsels supporting the regions we operate in, Specialists such as Risk Management, Compliance, ESG and IP Rights, and Project Leads supporting each of our large, cross functional strategic initiatives.

Our team is diverse, especially in terms of cultural backgrounds with 8 different nationalities represented. This means that we do not all think alike, and we challenge each other every day. With a “disagree and commit” approach, we manage the conflicts that naturally arise in a culturally diverse team, and we channel the difference of opinion into finding the best commercially viable legal solutions for our organisation.

One of our focus areas in 2024 is to become an even more scalable, value adding partner to our organisation. In-house legal teams truly bring value to the organisation it supports if it knows the business, the strategy, the products, and the risk appetite of each business unit. Gaining such in-depth knowledge of the business units the team supports, is achieved by being an integrated part of all strategy, prioritisation, product, and process meetings within the business unit in question. Building knowledge of the business unit to this extent means that our team knows what legal pain points the business unit is facing, knows what standard documents they need and builds trust between us and them. Finally, focusing on finding the solutions for the business, which are both commercially viable and legally sound, builds a great relationship between the legal team and the organisation around us. Insisting on the best legal solution, without a focus on the commercial needs, will do the opposite.

We are welcoming the development within AI to assist the legal team with drafting standard contracts, notes of meetings, policies, and guidelines. Using tools to assist with such tasks, will free up more time for the in-house counsels to provide assistance to the organisation where it really counts and adds value.

At Milestone Systems, we work with several external law firms around the world. We pick the best firms to work with, basing such assessment on within which area each firm excels. We no longer use one or two firms for all areas of the law. We mainly outsource tasks to the external firms because we either do not have the time/resources to handle a task ourselves or because we do not have the necessary expertise in-house.