About

After a number of years in private practice with Jenner & Block in Chicago and WilmerHale in Berlin, Sven Wehser joined Siemens where he enjoyed progressively broader roles in Munich, Beijing, and Erlangen in IP, licensing, M&A and business development. From here, he moved to Apple and its Asia Pacific team in Hong Kong and then Leica as general counsel and chief compliance officer. Now general counsel and business integrity officer for DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) with consumer goods giant Unilever, he takes on a myriad set of responsibilities. He is now leading the legal team in its current evolution towards being an even more agile, innovative, digital and collaborative unit than it is currently. ‘The legal team is now recognised as a key business enabler in particular in the space of digital, performance marketing and start-up collaborations’, he explains. Discussing the future of the legal profession, Wehser believes that ‘the wider legal profession is significantly behind other parts of the economy’ when it comes to harnessing technological resources available to it: ‘Legal sits on an incredibly valuable trove of data in contracts, relationships, negotiations, blogs, articles and books. Once solutions will interface with these data sets with big data analytics, machine learning and AI, the legal world will change in ways we cannot image today. Ultimately, it will disrupt the legal profession in similar ways technology disrupted other industries’.