Team size: Currently 9 FTE, to be broadened

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

Providing legal support to our group entities in their efforts to help with testing services in the ongoing Covid pandemic has been among the major ongoing projects in the past year. This brought multiple challenges, like contractual issues and GDPR. We also started a major project aligning and amending the corporate structures throughout our group entities, coordinating and managing large numbers of restructuring actions in around 35 different countries. We also intensified our CSR-related efforts, working on improved monitoring and reporting to increase CSR levels and transparency.

How do you feel the pandemic has changed the world of work for in-house counsel and the function of the general counsel?

The pandemic introduced a couple of changes such as an openness to remote work and a trend away from paper-based processes to digital. These trends find their reflections in the legal world as well, with some differences in detail. In my experience and perception, legal professionals are more paper savvy and tend to prefer office work rather than remote work. This puts the legal population in a company into the more conservative corner, as opposed to the IT population, for example. Regarding the role and function of general counsel, I don’t see major changes as a result of the pandemic; the global changes toward a more integrated role of legal functions and greater focus on compliance prior to the pandemic has had much more impact than short-term hot topics during the pandemic.

What will be the main focus for the company in the next 12 months and how do you intend to assist with this?

In the upcoming 12 months, Eurofins Group will continue its strategy to broaden and deepen its global footprint in all areas of bioanalytical testing, by organic growth and continued M&A activities. Supporting growth by providing operational legal advice and helping build the necessary structures to carry the bigger Group will be at the core of the tasks of legal functions throughout the Group. For example, the legal team is a pivotal player in a master data management and corporate data room project, where a cross-functional team is designing, programming and implementing a home-built software solution that will allow all our group entities to administer their master data (legal and operational master data), run approval processes and file relevant contract and regulatory documents. Another important area of support will be compliance management, where we will further broaden and improve the existing compliance programme and drive its implementation through all entities of the group, with a particular focus on newly acquired entities.