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

Managing legal aspects in instability or crisis starts long before an incident and continues well after it, with the general counsel acting as a strategic risk partner to protect value, maintain regulatory trust, and preserve optionality for the fund and its portfolio companies. In a private equity context, this means embedding legal risk management into the investment lifecycle, governance, and crisis playbooks so that the firm can respond quickly, maintain privilege, and stay focused on its fiduciary duties to investors. When instability arises, the general counsel convenes or joins a cross-functional crisis team with investment, compliance, finance, communications, and relevant portfolio leadership, ensuring clear ownership and rapid but documented decision-making. Legal helps define the facts, scope the issues, and set a decision log that balances immediate mitigation (e.g., injunctions, notifications, liquidity protections) with medium-term consequences such as regulatory scrutiny or investor claims.

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?

Three trends stand out from the past year that other in-house lawyers in German mid-cap private equity should actively watch: tightening regulatory expectations (especially around sustainability and FDI), the shift in product and fundraising structures (e.g. ELTIF 2.0, semi-liquid vehicles), and the practical impact of AI and legal tech on how small legal teams operate. In Europe, sustainability and transparency rules remain in flux, while market participants already anticipate a de-facto “SFDR 2.0” with new expectations around how private market strategies evidence their ESG impact. For a mid-cap sponsor, that means viewing ESG not just as investor reporting but as a legal risk topic: classification decisions, marketing language, side letters, and portfolio KPIs can all become contentious if regulation tightens or LP scrutiny increases. On the product side, ELTIF 2.0 has turned from a theoretical topic into a concrete structuring option, as the revised regime and the final RTS now enable more flexible, including open-ended, ELTIFs with access to retail investors across the EU. For smaller German managers, this opens an avenue to tap broader capital pools, but also raises complex questions around liquidity terms, suitability, and distribution oversight that legal needs to own from the outset. In Germany, deal activity has clearly shifted toward the small- and mid-cap segment, which benefits from more accessible financing, more reasonable valuations and somewhat lower regulatory visibility compared to large-cap buyouts. For in-house counsel, that translates into a need to professionalise “mid-cap standard” documentation and governance (warranties, covenants, management incentive schemes) to institutional PE levels, even when counterparties are family-owned Mittelstand businesses. Across these trends, the common thread is that in-house counsel in smaller German PE firms are moving from “deal lawyer plus compliance” to an integrated role covering regulation, product design, technology governance and portfolio readiness. Engaging early with FDI and ESG changes, understanding new fund and distribution structures like ELTIF 2.0, and selectively deploying AI tools can materially improve both risk management and competitiveness in the mid-cap segment.