Team size: 3 – 4

Career Biography

Prior to becoming General Counsel and Company Secretary at MeDirect Bank, Kim Van de Velden began her career as a lawyer at international law firms. She also worked as a tax consultant for a Big Four firm and has nearly 20 years’ experience advising and assisting (financial services) companies with their legal, regulatory, and tax matters, particularly in M&A and litigation.

Since 2020, she has served as a guest lecturer in tax law at the Louvain School of Management (LSM) and previously spent eleven years as a teaching assistant at the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL), covering company law and tax law.

She is an accredited in-house counsel and a member of both the Belgian Institute of In-House Counsels (IBJ-IJE) and the Belgian branch of the International Fiscal Association (IFA).

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

The acquisition of MeDirect Bank group by the Creditas group, which was closed on 9 September 2025, and an RMBS issuance.

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

To be valuable to your company, in-house counsel must outgrow the lawyer’s habit of merely explaining the law theoretically without drawing any workable conclusions that help the business/management to make an informed decision.

In case of unclear conclusions or outcomes, it is nevertheless key for in-house counsel to make that risk assessment without hiding behind variables and theoretical assumptions to justify not reaching any tangible conclusion.

Both the law and case-law are very often unclear (or the latter inexistant in some cases), yet an in-house counsel must be able to advise the business/management, despite this uncertainty, by issuing clear and concise conclusions in layman’s terms. This enables management to either still go ahead with a certain risk acceptance, as the case may be, or to cease the project in a most and time efficient manner.

Another valuable attribute would be to aim at settling any conflict out of court. I still experience too many cases where opposing in-house counsels lawyer up – and the latter are evidently biased by encouraging court litigation – because they do not want to defend internally an out-of-court settlement where some concessions had to be made.

How do you prioritise diversity and inclusion within your legal department, and what initiatives have you implemented to foster a more inclusive work environment?

While most major companies are reversing the (post-)Covid trend to allow for flexible and remote working, I kept the same level of flexibility. My team can work remotely whenever they want. This enables people who must take care of (small) children or other family members, or who are single parents or the primary caregiver, to still work in our highly challenging legal department and grow in their role and career. Employers who go back to the mandatory 5-day (or even less days) per week at work during business hours will inevitably exclude women, as well as people coming from more precarious backgrounds.

I also have absolutely no problem with team members deciding to work part-time or wishing to go on extended leave for personal reasons (sometimes even unpaid), even if this means hiring expensive legal interims because of our small team size. My HR strategy is a long-term full career cycle view until retirement, so what is a few months or even a year? As long as the team needs it, I will allow it. This also prevents burnouts and other illnesses.

Finally, I am very proud to share that I currently have a paralegal that came as a penniless refugee from Uzbekistan at 13 without speaking either French, Dutch or English. She is now, approximately 15 years later, one of the best paralegals I have ever worked with. As she has a four hour commute to come to the office, her husband is a self-employed contractor and they have a three year old, she works part time and can come to the office only when she wants. Next year she will go back to law school to finish her masters as she has now only finished her bachelors.

Based on your experiences in the past year, are there any trends in the legal or business world that you are keeping an eye on, of which you think other in-house lawyers should be mindful?

Like most of my peers I would say generative AI, albeit I have not seen any efficient and reliable legal tools so far, capable of even replacing humans for the simplest tasks.

Another trend I see, is the growing pressure to insource legal advice, which gives us in-house counsel more leverage when negotiating fees with external counsel, as their growth is correlatively stagnating or slowing in such areas.