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With a total project volume of complex infrastructure projects under management of approximately €24.5bn, state-owned firm DEGES goes about its business in an interdisciplinary manner, meaning that – as team lawyer Peter Welter explains – the company’s legal team ‘is therefore not reduced to the classic consulting role, but is an integral part of the value creation chain’. Overall head of the approximately 60-strong legal team is Martin Regnath, authorised signatory and division head of legal, real estate and procurement, who oversees this highly capable and versatile legal function.

Welter, who has been at the heart of much of the team’s success in recent years, gave some further insight into some of its most notable achievements over the past 24 months: ‘Recently, we have developed and provided new legal (and other) instruments: partner project processing with various mediation models, legal project assistance, fully electronic procurement and contract workflow and a new knowledge management system’. As well as this, he mentions that the company has ‘acquired new projects worth several billion euros from across Germany’, and has ‘recently successfully completed the procurement of a planning permission for 42 kilometre-long highway sections with a construction volume of approximately €776m’. Among a number of highly qualified in-house counsel, Ernst-Albrecht Notzke and Petra Kocken were mentioned alongside Regnath and Welter as having made particularly strong contributions to the team, the former for having ‘established and put into practice the legal project management regarding complex, technically challenging and lucrative projects’, and the latter ‘for the creation of uniform standards as well as the information and ongoing training of employees on legal topics’.