About

‘The in-house lawyer needs to understand the business and – especially in the tech industry – the technology of the business much deeper than ten years before or even than today’, says group general counsel and global head of M&A of Otto Group Martin Mildner when discussing what the successful future in-house counsel should be. ‘He has to transform his answers on legal problems concerning operational issues in a way that his business partners are convinced that the in-house lawyer is not only stressing the legal issue and why the project is not working, but that the in-house lawyer understands the business problem and knows how to develop a workable product’. His approximately 12-years with the Otto Group have seen him oversee a number of strategically important initiatives at the company. ‘The Otto group is probably the only international group in the online eCommerce business which were able during the last 15 years to transform its business from a pure analogue catalogue and retail business to one of the biggest digital eCommerce groups in the world’, he explains, ‘and to be able to serve other eCommerce player’s clients with nearly all financial and logistic services which an ecommerce retailer needs in the eCommerce-ecosystem’. The digital transformation of the company has, therefore, been a major focus of his work alongside the Otto Group executive board. Mildner is extremely pleased with the results of his work to organise the Otto Group legal team as well: ‘It was my clear goal from the beginning of my work within the Otto Group to transform not only the organisational structure of the legal department but also the mind-set of our in-house lawyers to a highly specialist department. This means that today our in-house lawyers are solely responsible for legal topics where they have a deep experience rather than handling every legal topic which comes to their desk’. When discussing project work, Mildner recalls the investment of the Bestseller Group in About You as one of the start-up-companies of the Otto Group with a valuation above $1bn in 2018 and the series of financial bonds that the Otto Group has issued, such as a hybrid bond of €300m in 2017-18 and the first green bond of a non-rated and non-listed issuer to the tune of €250m in 2019 as being major projects.