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Skandia Lebensversicherung offers insurance products linked to funds, has over 360,000 customers and administers a total amount of €12.4bn, while the Swedish company operates through its subsidiaries in over 20 countries on four continents. Head of legal and compliance, Frank Senge has ‘significantly increased the amount of in-house advice’. Prerequisite for this is, however, a high degree of specialisation of employees in the company’s various departments, a shift he has successfully made. Now the company only pays for external advice ‘in case of specific questions or when a second opinion is required because a lot is at stake’. Overall this has resulted in a significant legal department cost reduction. He has also ensured that the legal department is routinely part of operative processes which ‘helps adopting a pragmatic approach when giving advice and gives the opportunity to influence matters early-on’. Particular highlights were the outsourcing of parts of the administration of existing insurance contracts to South Africa; ‘the only case where an outsourcing to non-EU location has been granted by the legislator’. Senge has also been in charge of setting up a cross-border holding structure for life insurance companies in Germany, Austria, Poland and Switzerland and has advised on the development and the later distribution of German life insurance policies in Hungary and Czech Republic. He enjoys being able to advise the board directly and expects of law firms to ‘focus on analysing the actual needs of advice’.