About

Hitachi Data Systems, founded in 1989, specialises in data storage solutions and operates as part of Japanese electronics and industrial machinery corporation Hitachi, employing over 6,000 staff globally and operating in over 100 countries. As senior legal counsel, Oliver Weiß has transferred decision power and accountability to the respective case officer, ‘merely checking results without micro-managing’. The biggest challenge has been to adopt a thoroughly global approach in a company that nowadays is mostly led from the US: ‘For a German lawyer this means implementing Anglo-Saxon legal concepts, and the IT sector does not take “impossible” for an answer – and all this under stringent allocation of available resources’. However, it is particularly this reduction of US legal terminology to commercially comparable results in Europe that Weiß perceives as an enjoyable challenge. In his role at Hitachi Data Systems he ensures the communicative cross-over between ‘utterly different teams from technology, service, finance and sales’. External advisors should ‘listen first, and then reply’, however, should absolutely alert in-house counsel if ‘a question is not clearly structured; misunderstandings can quickly become expensive’.