About

Dr Arnd Haller joined Google in 2005 as its first legal counsel in Germany for the DACH region. He currently leads a team of 30 lawyers and is part of the management team of Google Germany. Since Haller started at Google, the company has grown from achieving US$6bn in revenue in 2005 to US$136bn in 2018. The biggest challenge for him was to keep track of the growing size of the company, the increased complexity (from a search engine to a company with hundreds of products reaching over one billion people globally) and the changed legislative landscape. In his long tenure at Google, Haller runs and supervises a significant number of litigation cases and regulatory proceedings. Many of the cases have “made history” in internet law, for example, Google Adwords (trademark-as-a-keyword cases), the legality of StreetView in Germany, and various liability cases for Google Websearch, Google Book Search, Google Image Search, Blogger where all cases were decided by the German Supreme Court (Bundesgerichtshof). Some of the pending cases at the Court of Justice of the European Union including: Peterson vs YouTube, VG Media case, and Gmail vs. BNetzA. In Haller’s view, ‘Artificial intelligence will be a major driver for changes in the legal profession. The introduction of AI in the daily business has just began and will speed up dramatically in the next years. This shift requires a new classification of liability risks. Also, legal tech can help legal departments to work faster and more efficient and allow lawyers to concentrate on delivering higher quality advice rather than administrative, lower value tasks’. Haller also thinks ‘Legal departments can drive changes in the legal profession when it comes to diversity. Big law firms are still far too dominated by male colleagues, in particular at partner level. While this is a known problem there is still not enough emphasis to change this situation. The same is true when it comes to other diversity aspects, socio-cultural background. Companies like Google can make a difference by supporting female lawyers, for example through asking firms for a mixed team of lawyers, inviting younger female lawyers them to events, asking for participation on panels and more’, he says. Apart from his role at Google, Haller is a founding board member of the search engine for kids, fragFINN, and enjoys to support this NGO that aims at increasing media literacy skills of younger kids with his expertise.