About

Having been a member of the general counsel’s office of EY in Germany since 2005, Sven Hähnel began his career with the firm in 1999 as an intern, working his way up in rank to co-general counsel in 2007, and regional general counsel for Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Liechtenstein (director rank) in 2008. During this time he also went on secondment to the EY office in London. In 2009 he passed his business mediator exam and in 2010 was promoted to partner, which as he says is ‘a nice achievement for an in-house lawyer in a professional services firm, where partners are usually measured by the fees they earn’. Since 2015, he has been a member of the GSA (Germany, Switzerland and Austria) regional leadership team. During his tenure Hähnel has changed his department from being mainly administrative to a business oriented legal department where each lawyer acts as a trusted business advisor. He identifies that, ‘team members are dedicated to specific service line offerings of EY and we developed them as subject matter experts for certain cross-service line matters (for instance in anti-money laundering, sanctions, anti-bribery, third-party agreements, non-disclosure agreements) so that they also have the advantage of a variety of matters they have to deal with regardless of their service line dedication’. Hähnel especially encourages lawyers of all GSA countries to consult with these experts and this enables the firm to better address potential shortages of legal capacities and competencies in the countries of its regions. Its team members are closely connected with their internal clients and can anticipate their developments and needs. In addition it has a recurring initiative to improve the way it handles legal matters to help client-facing colleagues with better, faster and simpler legal processes through better templates, less consultation or approval requirements, artificial intelligence or other technical solutions, or outsourcing to one of EY’s shared service centres. Hähnel highlights that in the future his team will be influenced by new technologies. He says that, ‘technology, specifically AI, will hopefully evolve and will release lawyers from work that will not require a deep legal expertise so that they can focus on matters that require our expertise. We are desperately working on and spending time and money for a semantic recognition platform that will hopefully help us review non-disclosure agreements… AI should enable lawyers to become even more agile and nevertheless being able to provide the best legal advice, ready to be used’. Hähnel values teamwork and cooperation within his team and in a wider sense working together across the organisation with clients, as well as diversity and inclusion policies, and the mentoring of junior lawyers. He is a commendable leader with extensive knowledge of the professional services sector.