Team size: 14

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crises, and how does your legal strategy align with the broader business strategy to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

At all times maintain an understanding of the financial impact and the time sensitivity of any given issue facing us, prioritising resources accordingly so we speed up where speed matters and go deep where substantive analysis is required. Challenges can come in many different shapes and forms and should be seen as such, seeing only nails and hitting them hard will not give the best outcomes on a case-by-case basis. This always applies but even more during times of crisis and low visibility. Using available resources as efficiently as possible and focusing on what brings most value, also where reducing loss is the best value achievable, aligns with wider business needs and helps the wider organisation achieving wider business targets.

What are the major cases or transactions you have been involved in recently?

DFDS in early 2024 acquired Spanish ferry operator FRS and in Q4 Turkish-based logistics operator Ekol Transport and both operations have to a wide degree been integrated in the DFDS team, bringing new legal colleagues to the already talented and diverse Legal & Insurance community!

What emerging technologies do you see as having the most significant impact on the legal profession in the near future, and how do you stay updated on these developments?

Over the years we have followed various legal tech solutions and generally not found much that made operational and financial sense for a relatively minor legal function like ours. The arrival of GenAI may be an exception to that main rule since it does not require you to fit your operations into a pre-defined mould, dealing with a typically minor part of legal operations, GenAI, in our case CoPilot as part of our general Microsoft solutions, offers the opportunity to speed up more mundane activities and/or to facilitate shortcuts to areas of input that may not be key but will support a decision-making process taking in additional information. As always, the technology as such does not fix your issues but used properly can assist you in fixing the same issues and as always you need to balance where quick fixes do the trick vs instances requiring substantive analysis. In both scenarios, care should be exercised in prompting input and a critical eye should be applied to the output.

In your opinion, what are the main trends that are salient in your country currently (these can be legal, political, economy or business-based)?

A very limited part of our business is done in Denmark, and most is done within the EU and Mediterranean countries and noteworthy these days basically no business is done in the US. As such, we observe that for now there is a historically rare trend towards decreasing regulatory burden while in most countries not abandoning the underlying concepts as such. The same may to some extent be said about the green transition where the trend across markets seem to be a more hesitant or even reluctant approach may be observed in terms of identifying the proper long-term technological solutions, justifying the required investments and focusing on the possibility of passing on costs to customers.