About

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’.