Gerlinde Krieger – GC Powerlist
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Germany 2014

Gerlinde Krieger

Group legal counsel | Scandlines Deutschland

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Germany 2014

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Gerlinde Krieger

Group legal counsel | Scandlines Deutschland

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Gerlinde Krieger is group legal counsel at Scandlines, a German-Danish shipping company that carries 20 million passengers and 4 million cars annually. Krieger’s team is based in Germany and Denmark, however, prior to her joining in 2003, a legal department as such did not exist. Masterfully and relentlessly has she built the department since then, step by step. One of these steps has been implementing an archiving system for documents, accessible from all over the world, containing 20,000 documents and makes it possible to search for and produce reports of particular types of documents according to specific criteria. ‘We cannot imagine how legal departments can reply quickly and thoroughly to specific questions without such a system’. She also emphasises the importance of variety in terms of recruitment. ‘Corporate counsel are scarcely able to answer detailed accounting questions which is why we have hired employees with backgrounds in a variety of subject areas, our biggest strength’. Particular challenges in her career so far have been several M&A projects but what she underlines is another achievement: ‘The legal department has been a highly valued partner in every phase of the company’s legal transformation from a government owned entity to an efficient group of companies’. Krieger enjoys in her role working for a shipping company the ‘broad range of matters, from solving complex corporate matters until getting wet feet when checking in with employees on site’. Law firms she successfully works with have to understand that ‘corporate counsel don’t have time to read Federal Court rulings word by word. We need clear opinions’.

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