Key team members: Anton Mikkelsen, Senior Vice President & Group General Counsel; Rikke Nybroe, Head of Legal HQ & North-Central Europe; Greg Young, Senior Privacy & AI Counsel; Emil Lind-Holm, Legal Counsel; Anne-Sofie Søegaard, Legal Team Coordinator.

Team size: Five

Jurisdictions your role covers: Global with regional counsels in key markets

What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

The Danish legal team are involved both in advising colleagues in HQ but even more as part of commercial projects driven from HQ but with an international or global outreach. Those projects involve, e.g. global projects within data and AI and key relationship with global suppliers. In addition, the HQ team partners with the commercial teams in both new go-to-market models and launch of new products. Across Europe, the HQ team also partners with the organisation around sales strategies, and the global competition program is also run from HQ. The legal team are involved as true partners enabling commercial priorities succeed, helping Coloplast achieve its mission to help more people with intimate healthcare needs. A key task for the Danish legal team during the past year has also been integration activities where an acquired company has been integrated across Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland. Very recently, the Danish legal team has also been led on yet another acquisition announced in connection with Coloplast’s Q1 announcement.

What factors influence your team’s decision to use external legal services versus handling matters in-house, and what criteria are used to evaluate their performance?

We always start inhouse as we in the vast majority of cases will be able to handle matters internally. We are doing this because the legal team has a deep understanding of how Coloplast’s business is running and the priorities and therefore are able to advice better than external counsels. We normally use external counsel if: it is a country where we are not represented and on areas, where we cannot answer based on general knowledge; for large projects where we need more hands; M&A; litigation; and certain specialist areas we do not have competencies to cover internally.

How does your team contribute to the overall business strategy of the company? Can you share an example of a recent legal-led initiative that had a significant impact?

We play a big role in delivering on the overall business strategy. We define our goals through dialogue with commercial leaders and are very aware of key priorities and must win battles. On top, we then typically also develop risk mitigating activities. Coloplast recently established a direct presence in Norway, which is a completely new business model in that market. That whole initiative could not have been done without the legal team. Also, our work around use of data is very impactful, however, details here cannot be disclosed. Finally, the legal team in Denmark recently led an acquisition of a US company – announced in Coloplast’s Q1 announcement – which is expected to contribute to our IU business as a strategically important acquisition.

How do you approach talent development and knowledge sharing within your legal team? Are there any specific practices or programmes in place?

We knowledge share across our global legal team both through global Group Legal meetings, all staff meetings and topic specific meetings. Many projects we are engaged in has an international or global impact and therefore collaboration across countries are very important and works well. For talent development, we conduct an annual organisational review with a bi-annual follow-up particularly on talent development. In connection with this, we complete a competency mapping, succession planning, talent mapping, critical keeper mapping and then we define actions to support the findings which we follow-up on, on an ongoing basis.