What are the most significant cases, projects and/or transactions that you and/or your legal team have recently been involved in?

Most of the matters handled by our Legal team are subject to strict confidentiality, and Hapag-Lloyd follows a very conservative communication strategy. As a result, only very few legal projects or transactions are made public, which unfortunately prevents me from sharing concrete details. However, a major focus over the past two years has been legal support for the set-up of the ‘Gemini Cooperation’ with Maersk, a long-term, strategic operational collaboration launched on February 1st 2025, designed to create a flexible, interconnected ocean freight network with industry-leading schedule reliability across key East-West trades.

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

During periods of instability or crisis, resilience depends on clear priorities, fast decision-making, and close alignment between Legal and the business. Legal must shift from risk avoidance to risk management, enabling continuity while safeguarding the organisation. Structure, communication, and preparedness are decisive. At the same time Legal must enable sustainable growth. For this the ability to act, invest, and adapt must be preserved. Legal must therefore function also as a stabiliser and a growth enabler.

What strategies do you employ to ensure the successful digital transformation of a legal department while maintaining compliance with your country’s data protection laws?

When driving digital transformation in a legal department, we focus on a pragmatic balance between innovation and professional compliance. From a German perspective, classic data protection requirements are generally manageable. The real constraint lies in professional secrecy and regulatory obligations under the BRAO, which significantly limit the use of many international cloud-based and AI-driven solutions. As a result, certain tools can currently only be used with additional safeguards, such as strict anonymisation, pseudonymisation, or hybrid setups, and some solutions are excluded altogether until they meet the required standards. This makes careful tool selection essential.

At the same time, digital transformation cannot be postponed. It is the dominant challenge of recent years and will remain so. The real value lies currently still less in sophisticated tools and more in standardisation, simplification of workflows, and clear process ownership, which serve as the key enablers for sustainable transformation.

In short, get started before it gets you started, early, structured adoption is far less risky than delayed, reactive change.

Have you had any experiences during your career as a lawyer that stand out as particularly unique or interesting?

One particularly distinctive aspect of my career is the depth and breadth of my labour law expertise. I have built this not only through many years of practical experience, but also academically, through a doctoral thesis, the qualification as a Fachanwalt, and a clear professional focus on employment law. This combination has allowed me to handle complex, sensitive workforce matters with both legal precision and strategic awareness. In parallel to labour law, I have been building strong expertise in legal operations management and the digital transformation of legal departments. This includes standardising processes, simplifying workflows, and leveraging technology to make legal teams more efficient, scalable, and business-aligned. The intersection of deep substantive legal expertise and operational transformation is where I find my work particularly interesting and where I see the future role of in-house lawyers.

Given the current geopolitical shifts and growing uncertainties around international free trade, has your company’s risk profile evolved, and are you taking measures to address these challenges?

From a purely legal standpoint, the company’s risk profile remains largely stable. The applicable legal frameworks and core regulatory obligations have not fundamentally shifted. What has changed, however, is the economic pressure under which decisions are made: maintaining key financial metrics and asserting ourselves in a more competitive and volatile market environment has become essential.

Hapag-Lloyd AG is an organisation where decisions are driven primarily by operational realities. In this context, Legal does not steer strategy but acts as a reliable enabler. Our focus is on supporting fast, commercially driven decisions by translating them into legally robust solutions, minimising friction and avoiding unnecessary delays.

Based on your experiences in the past year, are there any trends in the legal or business world that you are keeping an eye on that you think other in-house lawyers should be mindful of?

Two trends stand out: first, the necessity to integrate AI into everyday legal work, paired with clear governance around data protection, confidentiality, and regulatory compliance. Second, the rise of legal operations management, with stronger focus on processes, KPIs, and technology to meet cost and efficiency pressures. Together, these trends are transforming legal teams into more operational, data-driven business partners.

How can general counsel foster a corporate culture that supports ESG principles and compliance across all levels of the organisation?

A general counsel can anchor ESG and compliance in a company’s core values and daily decision-making. At Hapag-Lloyd, the values “We care. We move. We deliver.” guide behaviour and strategic choices across the organisation, including non-operational functions like Legal. On this basis, a value-driven, proactive and operationally integrated approach can be taken at all times by embodying corporate values into legal and ESG frameworks, leading by example and collaborating cross-functionally and communicating and educating.

Hapag-Lloyd’s values – We care, We move, We deliver – are more than slogans, serve as an internal compass for all business conduct and decisions. Also, Legal should partner with HR, Compliance, Sustainability and Operations to ensure consistent interpretation of values and standards. Lastly, internal campaigns, workshops, and inclusion of ESG/compliance topics in leadership forums reinforce that ‘We care’ extends to human rights, environmental topics, and ethical conduct. This supports compliance not as a checkbox but as lived behaviour.

AI has been taken seriously as a potentially revolutionary technological change in the legal world for a number of years now. Has it had a meaningful impact in how your legal team works in this time?

Yes. AI has already had a meaningful impact on how our legal team works, but it has not yet resulted in a full-scale transformation of the legal function. We are currently in a phase of identifying and validating concrete use cases. The focus is on efficiency gains, higher-value legal work, and long-term cost optimisation