About

In July 2015 Dennis Grabherr took charge of HPE’s North Europe legal team comprising of a total of over 20 lawyers spread out over ten jurisdictions. This team was essential in the regional implementation of what has been referred to as ‘the largest corporate separation of recent years’: the split of Hewlett-Packard Company into two separately listed entities, HP Inc. and HPE, with most of the work being handled in-house. Then, in 2016, the team was instrumental in the divestiture of HPE’s outsourcing division (ES) and its software business.

The coordination of these endeavours at global and local level was challenging and included the set-up and sale of numerous legal entities, the transfer of thousands of employees and the novation of a multitude of supply and customer contracts – all whilst keeping costs under control and meeting globally set time lines. These and further M&A transactions over time kept the North Europe legal team extremely busy in parallel to overseeing the ongoing commercial legal support of the business. In order to achieve success here and on other notable projects, the lawyers in his team are ideally suited to the organisation both in terms of ability and personality. ‘Besides strong legal skills we have colleagues with the ability to think across functions, to network and be the opposite of a lone legal opinion writer – we need the lawyers to have a hands on approach. Our initial focus is on immediate relevant legal and commercially translatable skills without sacrificing neither the quality of the legal work nor the integrity of the in-house lawyers’, Grabherr explains. Allied to this, consistent improvements in internal processes have been achieved via, for instance, the structured use of contract lifecycle tools which link various internal functions together on one harmonised platform. In addition, the HPE-sponsored legal pro bono work passionately performed by all HPE legal team members and dedicated to charitable institutions across the region is not just highly motivational but also a demonstration of HPE’s corporate values put into action.