About

Telefónica Germany accounts for roughly one-third of the mobile telephone service market in Germany since its acquisition of the E-Plus Group in 2014, making it one of the major players in the country’s telecoms market. Marcel Ritter has been general counsel of the group since this time, and prior to the takeover held a number of senior positions with the company since the early 2000s. He mentions a number of career highlights, particularly his role in the aforementioned E-Plus deal, in which he undertook ‘legal consulting in the design of the comprehensive infrastructure, operational and commercial integration of the E-Plus Group’, alongside ‘the integration of one unified central general counsel unit’. Ritter has emphasised ‘collaboration between the classic legal services and compliance, data protection, security and internal auditing’, which has ‘been more closely interlinked’ during the course of his tenure. Alongside improving the efficiency of the human component of the legal team, Ritter has also spearheaded the ‘design and implementation of an innovative, digital, company-wide legal cost management and reporting tool’, which reduces individual admin efforts of the team in response to the challenges it faces and improves quality and analysis of the data available. Ritter has been successful in further positioning the general counsel division as ‘a strategic trusted partner in the company, which is actively involved in the company’s decision-making and has high business competence’. Given that the company operates in a highly competitive environment, his efforts towards this are all the more important.