Dr Claudia Junker is Senior Managing Director of the Group and Head of Law and Integrity at Deutsche Telekom, overseeing Law, Privacy, and Compliance since 2020. She continues to serve as General Counsel of Deutsche Telekom, heading the legal department, a position she assumed in November 2010.

Since 2021, she has also been President of the German Federal Association of Inhouse Lawyers (Bundesverband der Unternehmensjuristen). Since April 2022, she has also been active as Head of the Legal Committee of the Federation of German Industries (BDI). She is Vice-President of the European General Counsel Association and participates in the Committee for Economy and Law (Arbeitskreis Wirtschaft und Recht).

Since 2012, Dr Junker has held various teaching positions at the universities of Cologne and Heidelberg. She also publishes regularly, for example on corporate law.

Before joining Deutsche Telekom, Dr Junker worked for many years as a lawyer in private practice, specialising in corporate law (including M&A), most recently as a partner in an international law firm. During that time, she often worked for Deutsche Telekom. Since 2007, Dr Junker has also been a specialist lawyer for commercial and corporate law (Fachanwältin für Handels- und Gesellschaftsrecht).

She studied law in Germany, Switzerland (Geneva), and the U.S. She holds a PhD from Heidelberg University and an LL.M. from Cornell University.

Claudia Junker considers one of her key achievements to be the creation of a Law & Integrity department with outstanding internal client satisfaction – every single year.

Simultaneously, she has focused on digitisation and AI; for example, she was an early adopter and began implementing AI for lawyers as early as summer 2023. Already in 2021, she established Law & Integrity as an ‘agile organisation,’ structured into socalled tribes, clusters, chapters, and squads. To future-proof the department in light of upcoming demographic changes, since 2022 she has developed a ‘Junior Excellence Chapter,’ with newcomer lawyers joining a three-year rotation programme to gain broad expertise across multiple areas of work. Another major challenge during Claudia’s tenure has been managing the required substantial reduction of FTEs while concurrently strengthening the skills and motivation of the Law & Integrity team. Currently, her focus is on digitisation combined with international scale.