About

With 17 years of legal experience in the banking industry, Frederick Schönig joined Aareal Bank in 2007 and has been serving as head of transactional legal since 2013. He is currently in charge of managing a team of 15 international in-house lawyers who oversee all legal aspects of Aareal’s international property finance transactions. Schönig started his career in the banking and finance practice group of Ashurst in Frankfurt and London before moving in-house. Talking about his time at private practice, Schönig says: ‘During my first years as a lawyer, I had a mentor who taught me to think about business and legal issues at the same time. I learned how to advise on legal matters with a view to help businesses achieve targets, which is the key to succeed as a commercial lawyer’. He regards the experience as an asset that he could then easily transform and further develop when he became an in-house lawyer. Another highlight of his legal career is the implementation of a legal spending management software at Aareal Bank, which could improve the quality of external legal services for the bank, improve the bank’s loan products, manage legal service procurement costs, as well as drive digitalisation of workflows. In his current role, Schönig has successfully established small teams specialising in different regions, as well as implemented a very progressive mobile working concept where team members can choose their workplace freely up to 50% of their working hours. ‘This underlines our mind-set of self-organisation, and team members are encouraged to make use of digital solutions to efficiently work and communicate despite remote distance’, he explains. During the last few years, Schönig’s legal team has successfully supported the financing of several high volume cross border property portfolios with loans amount up to €1bn. Commenting on the evolving in-house legal role, Schönig states, ‘The trend “from mere legal specialist to trusted advisor” will continue. Besides the risk management element, future successes of in-house counsel will be benchmarked against the added value they bring to the business. Digital skills will become crucial, to increase quality of the legal services and business support and to stay cost efficient at the same time. Legal workflows will be split up into lower value parts which are easily open to digitalisation and higher value parts which will be dealt with by human brains for the time being. We will have to encourage law firms to rethink pricing models and digitalisation for themselves’.