About

A highly respected general counsel who has been at the forefront of some of the most complex and innovative legal projects in Europe – being awarded by multiple sources in the industry press while doing so – Hyun-Soo Kim can look back on over a decade of success with Hyundai Motor Europe (HME). Kim had a significant role in Hyundai’s reorganisation of its European distribution system, as he explains: ‘A strategic decision was made to reorganise to operate directly through wholly owned subsidiaries, and as a part of this the seven most important distributors were taken over and consolidated into the Hyundai group. This acquisition remains the biggest transaction of the Hyundai Group in Europe to date and is regarded as a landmark deal within the Group’. As well as this, Kim is particularly proud of being made chief compliance officer in addition to general counsel in 2015, and his successful actions upon assuming this position. ‘The task given to me by senior management of the Hyundai Motor Company in South Korea was to implement a compliance structure in all Hyundai’s European businesses’, he explains, ‘and within two years I built effective compliance structures and processes from scratch that are used within HME and all our European subsidiaries’. In order to achieve these and other successes for the Group, Kim was able to build a top-quality legal team from scratch. ‘At the time when I joined HME in 2005’, recalls Kim, ‘I was the only person handling HME´s legal affairs. As the scope of responsibilities grew, I built a very quick-witted team of eight lawyers qualified in different jurisdictions of Europe and each specialized in different areas of law at HME’. In addition to this, Kim has direct report lines from all ten of the company’s European subsidiaries, providing a highly complicated workload that he successfully manages. In 2016 Kim re-designed Hyundai’s warranty concept in order to strengthen the protection of the selective distribution system in Europe. This innovative solution of a commonly known issue in the industry has received great interest and resulted in nominations and prestigious awards. Kim’s work on the above and other projects, combined with his commercial acumen and success in building and managing an elite legal team, mark him out as one of the outstanding general counsel in Germany.