Team size: 60

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

There are two aspects which I think are extremely important. Firstly, everyone within the legal and compliance teams has to understand in detail their clients business and the overall strategy of the company as in time of instability and crisis, they have to understand priorities and need to be able to move the business forward to its goals in a compliant way. Only then will you be able to create understanding for legal restrictions and ensure that people stick to it. in order to achieve this, we regular get trainings from business about their tasks and goals and also give detailed information about the business development, financially and businesswise. The second aspect is that you need to provide clarity and stability to the team, while at the same time being flexible in what you do. Change is the only constant thing in phases like this. Clarity means what do we want to achieve and what doe we stand for, stability means everyone knows that they are valued and part of the team, even when making mistakes. However, everyone needs to be able to adapt to new challenges. This is the main quality we hire for and we foster it by putting team members up for new challenges regularly.

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?

The foundation is the development of a digital strategy for our department, which includes input of the team in order to have a high acceptance by the team. All our efforts are geared to becoming more efficient in certain repetitive tasks, so that each individual member has more time to focus on the complicated, strategic and at the end more fun stuff on our plates. So, the approach is very human centric, which also creates a lot of acceptance and support. Based on that strategy we have initiated various projects, all supported and initiated by team members who are heavily involved and through that become ambassadors for the products built and which then later help to motivate the rest of the team to try out the new products or processes. In addition, we focus a lot on change management, pointing out the benefits the new digital tools have on our users.