About

Constructed from scratch over the past two years, general counsel Maxim Letski reports that the Open Xchange legal department is now a ‘highly specialised and dynamic legal team covering all major legal issues of the Group in-house’. Internally, it has brought about major positive changes to the team and the wider company: ‘The Open-Xchange legal team managed to implement GDPR-related changes and requirements to the business, established Open Source compliance and the implementation of a licence policy for the development of Open-Xchange’s software products, using legal technology applications to accomplish both these goals’. Externally, the team has managed a number of high-value projects of strategic importance to the company. ‘The team has worked on several multi-million outsourcing deals and licences agreements, including complex statements of work for software implementation and migration projects with different corporate customers in various jurisdictions’, Letski says. ‘It managed a cross-border IP and competition law litigation mainly taking place in the US and in Italy. The litigation involved two of Open-Xchange’s subsidiaries and lasted for over two years’. ‘Furthermore’, he says, ‘the team has supported the Group with a cross-border IP transfer from one of its subsidiaries, which has been acquired in 2015, into the holding company. Another important and outstanding accomplishment was to define and design a Group-wide corporate governance and compliance structure which has been accepted by the Group’s supervisory board and has been moved into the process of operational implementation. The implementation is now coordinated by the team in close collaboration with Open-Xchange’s board of executives and the extended management team. Apart from himself, Letski mentions Juliane Rychlik, Jorge Kärcher and Alexandar Stajic as having made exceptional contributions to the team’s success. Rychlik was mentioned for her ‘very efficient and productive management of GDPR implementation’, Kärcher for his ‘outstanding technical understanding’ and Stajic for his ‘tireless support of the legal team and management in handling complex issues’.