About

Styrolution is a global supplier of styrene plastics and a BASF and INEOS joint venture with a turnover of €5.8bn and over 3,000 employees worldwide. Not surprising, Anke Frankenberger’s team is based all over the world, and she has been recruiting lawyers in Germany, China, the US, France, Poland and India. A daily challenge she sets herself is the ‘selection, motivation and guidance of staff’ but what she enjoys is the ‘international nature of the work and the proximity to commercial and technical issues and decisions’ but also ‘that you never know in the morning what you will have done by the end of the day, in spite of a clear plan’. A corner stone for her success is her motto that ‘good in-house work is always based on service orientation and precision, just as it is in a good law firm’. She is convinced that it is ‘only in rare circumstances sensible’ to directly join an in-house legal department and she actively encourages secondments to offer young lawyers at law firms the opportunity to familiarise themselves with the in-house perspective. External lawyers score points if they ‘ask more and listen more closely’ and continuously coordinate rather than ‘simply wait for new instructions’.