About

Florian Schaefer joined Leica Camera in 2008 as the group’s first in-house counsel ever, today acting as general counsel of Leica Camera’s headquarters in Wetzlar, Germany, and its subsidiaries across the globe in over 20 jurisdictions. Over the years, he has built up a seven members strong legal and compliance team, leading it with sensitive communication skills according to St. Gallen leadership principles, and emphasising diversity and trust. As general counsel, his range of responsibilities covers all legal and compliance matters of an internationally active manufacturing and distribution company. His major areas of expertise include corporate governance, compliance, the company’s IP portfolio, distribution law, and M&A. In general, he managed to position himself as a pragmatic and commercially minded solution provider, always carefully balancing the business’ demands, objectives and risk exposure. Today, the legal and compliance team is a fully accepted business partner and well-integrated into the various business units.

In terms of digitisation and legal tech, Mr Schaefer can be considered one of the leaders of the digital revolution of legal departments. In 2012, he decided to run a fully digital office and introduced a multi-functional document management system. Ever since, continuous improvement of the digital solutions is a top priority which enabled the team to continue providing its expertise and services throughout the Covid-19 pandemic without restrictions. Today, diverse web-based tools exist including, among others, a comprehensive data base of templates available for the business units on the legal and compliance page in Leica’s intranet, a web-based service desk with reporting and dashboard functions, online training platforms, electronic signatures and signing workflows. Hence, Mr Schaefer is a reference within the in-house community proving legal tech as an accelerator for a legal team’s growth at low costs.

Beyond the digitisation in the legal and compliance division and the cutting-edge leadership culture, career highlights worth mentioning to date are the foundation of by far more than twenty group companies globally, most recently a hub in the Middle East region and two additional German based entities for new business segments (Leica Eyecare and Laser TV), corporate restructurings, among others, intragroup mergers and split-offs, the successful placement of bonded loans in a value of above €100m, the introduction of a compliance program including a digital whistleblowing system (since April 2022), various license and joint development and engineering agreements of substantial value for the future growth of the group, the establishment of a global selective distribution system for the premium Leica products, and successfully closing an almost four years lasting international IP related dispute for the strategic benefit of the company.