Team size: 4 (including General Counsel)

What are the key projects that you have been involved in over the past 12 months?

The Damovo Group legal team provides a full range of legal support services to all of our business units and markets in eleven different countries located across Europe, the USA and Central America. Aside from large-scale transactional work and litigation, the team manages the majority of legal matters in-house. While the primary focus of the legal support we provide to the operating companies is commercial contracts and general legal advice, the legal team also plays a central role in managing our policy compliance and enterprise risk programmes, our data protection and sustainability frameworks, and all governance and company secretarial matters for the Damovo Group.

During the past 12 months, the legal team has managed a wide variety of matters. On the corporate transactional side, an internal corporate restructuring to streamline multiple legal entities under our primary holding company was successfully completed. On the legal operations side, we have evaluated various artificial intelligence-related legal tools, including several contract drafting solutions, to assess if they would materially improve the efficiency and quality of the legal support we provide across the Group (nothing implemented as yet!).

Governance, risk and compliance have also been a focus during the last 12 months. The team has led the roll-out of several policies across the Group, such as AI policy and sanctions and export controls, and introduced additional controls to supplement our governance framework, e.g. a contract signing policy.

Have you had any experiences during your career as a lawyer that stand out as particularly unique or interesting?

I spent several years with Vodafone working in Qatar in the Middle East. My role was Legal Director and Company Secretary for Vodafone Qatar, which is a PLC. It was a very interesting and rewarding time from both a personal and professional perspective. Working in a different culture with multiple nationalities requires you to tailor your approach to make sure that all cultural norms are respected and so that you can operate effectively within that environment. For example, transactions with local partners can take significantly longer and require you to develop and maintain good relationships with all stakeholders involved in the transaction in order to be successful. I definitely feel that my time in Qatar made me a better all-round lawyer, and I would recommend the experience of living and working as a lawyer in a different country to anyone.

What do you think are the most important attributes for a modern in-house counsel to possess?

In my experience, knowing your business and being able to structure legal advice and support in a practical, commercially focused way that allows the business to achieve their strategic and commercial objectives is a critical attribute for an effective in-house counsel. Positioning yourself and your team as a strategic business partner and key enabler is important in this context. I also think that being able to exercise good judgement in terms of balancing the risk vs reward in any scenario is crucial for ensuring that you can deliver positive outcomes for your organisation. Understanding the risk tolerance of your business and how that contributes to and informs decision making are key components to this.