About

Dr. Valesca Molinari is general counsel — vice president of legal and compliance — at the hydrogen company Sunfire, a growth company on its way to becoming a major industrial player. She is a process-savvy generalist with broad international experience and an entrepreneurial approach.

At Sunfire, she is building a business— and process—integrated legal department. The legal department is a crucial player at Sunfire on all strategically important projects, such as large international sales agreements, scaling production capacity, and equity financing rounds.

One of her objectives is that legal solutions should be commercially pragmatic and applicable, not only ‘correct’. Therefore, legal services are integrated into Sunfire’s value chain. She has built a team of four internationally experienced, market-recognised experts, all with a technology-savvy consulting approach. The team operates in an agile manner to match the fast-growing and very demanding market environment of a key technology provider to produce green hydrogen. Interface competence and interdisciplinary cooperation are crucial for success.

Before joining Sunfire, Valesca was an internationally acting corporate lawyer at Baker McKenzie. She served as co-head of innovation and legal tech for the firm’s German and Austrian offices, responsible for both strategy and implementation. Valesca also spent a year as a fellow at the World Economic Forum’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution in San Francisco to develop innovative approaches to legal frameworks for future technologies such as autonomous cars and artificial intelligence. A special distinction of her work was the exceptional invitation to present as the first C4IR Fellow at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos 2020 to top international executives.

Today, she is one of the legal industry’s leading minds known for digitalisation, process understanding, innovation, and a cross-disciplinary approach. She is a board member of the Legal Tech Verband Deutschland, which promotes innovation in the German legal market. In this role, she runs an interdisciplinary round table focusing on legal operations, to which all players along the value chain are invited for an open exchange. As a member of the Advisory Board of the Bundesverband der Wirtschaftskanzleien, she is in close contact with corporate law firms. She acts as an ambassador at the interface of the market players to inspire exchange and strengthens cooperation.

These board activities, her various awards, and her speaker requests (most recently, a panel together with the German Federal Minister of Justice Marco Buschmann) are testimony to her recognition in the market.

Valesca regularly writes and speaks on digitalisation and legal innovation. Before becoming an attorney, Valesca was co-founder and CEO of a start-up in the energy sector and a research assistant at Humboldt University in Berlin. Valesca is also regularly engaged as a mentor for young talents and founders and has lectured on digitisation and law at a German university for several years.