About

A leading mail company Postcon Deutschland is responsible for delivering billions of letters per year. Christina Sontheim now leads a team of eight individuals in her role as chief legal and compliance officer for this complicated business, and goes into the formative professional experiences that have moulded her into a top-level in-house legal professional: ‘Starting directly with my first job in a big international company had an enormous impact on the way I work, as did leading my first bigger team and taking on my current role as chief legal and compliance officer. However, it was not always the highlights that moulded me in my professional career but more those events where things did not go to plan; this was where I learned most from for the future, as I imagine is the same for many lawyers’. She has managed to make a huge impact in a short time since taking on her current role, also. ‘Being in my current role for a little over a year’, says Sontheim, ‘the legal department has evolved into to a completely different role than before. I managed to bring a lot of new, high-performance talent aboard, all with a proactive mindset. With them, we built up in-house knowledge in the team that had been outsourced to external lawyers completely before’. When bringing in this high-level talent into the new legal function, Sontheim kept six basic characteristics in mind that she believes are most desirable in an in-house lawyer. She explains that ‘a top in-house counsel should: have the ability to listen to the needs of their in-house clients, be able to talk in a way that clients can understand without using jargon, know their company, stay open-minded, be prepared at all times, and understand that you can’t do your job without the colleagues surrounding you’.