First, can you please give us an idea of the sort of work your team has done recently?

We have been in full integration mode since March 2021 following the successful conclusion of the roughly year-long acquisition phase between the legacy ams and legacy Osram companies. We now work as one united team.

What are the main qualities you need to be successful as an in-house lawyer, as opposed to a private practice one?

The beauty of working in-house, and also the challenge, is that you have one large customer, one large client. You don’t have the bird’s-eye perspective that you do in a law firm. From the law firm perspective, you may be working in the corporate department, so you just see the corporate angle of the transaction that ends with the closing of the transaction. The in-house function on the other hand has full visibility, and you really have to allocate the competencies within your team properly to achieve your goals.

The beauty is that you can fully dive into all issues, but this is also the challenge; involved from the very beginning until the end.

If you take business considerations into account when giving advice, you can really provide effective counsel. This means asking nasty questions: “why are we doing this?”. You would obviously not ask this as an external counsel because you are charging by billable hours.