About

A highly capable legal team regarded as one of the best in Germany by local legal press, KfW maintains a legal team of 85 organised across three departments. The department is further subdivided into eight teams dealing with, inter alia, the domestic business of KfW as well as international projects and export financing, financial cooperation with developing countries, insolvency and restructuring, litigation, KfW’s refinancing and derivatives, corporate housekeeping and banking supervision law, public procurement law and IT law. General counsel Dr Karsten Hardraht is in charge of the team and mentioned its most important projects completed to be ‘transaction consulting for international export and project financing with a total volume of €13.8bn in 2017, legal advice with regard to financial cooperation with developing countries for a total volume of €8.2bn in 2017, the acquisition of a 20% stake in the German high-voltage energy network operator 50Hertz Transmission on behalf of the Federal Government of Germany and participation in the set up and launch of the Connecting Europe Broadband Fund among other investors’. In terms of its internal achievements and how it has improved the abilities and efficiency of the team, Dr Hardraht mentions the ‘restructuring of the legal department and implementation of a third hierarchy level, the reshaping of the legal department’s role in controlling legal risks and the establishment of a group-wide legal board to coordinate legal issues within the group’. Dr Hardraht has also strengthened the ability of his legal team to face the challenges of digitisation by way of appointing a coordinating legal expert focussing on legal advice in this new and specific area of law and on the implementation of legal tech applications within the legal team. KfW’s panel of external law firms which has been newly structured in 2018 is administered and monitored by a central legal operations team which is directly reporting to Dr Hardraht. Promoting innovation externally and internally as well as a truly enviable list of transactions worked on recently, further plaudits look set to roll in for the extremely successful KfW legal team.