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Germany Teams 2018

Industrials and real estate

Siemens

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Germany Teams 2018

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With an overall headcount of approximately 1,500 individuals, Siemens’ legal firepower is comparable to a significant dedicated law firm. Jörg Häring, general counsel for Europe and Africa and general counsel for the power and gas division, explains how this large operation is organised to most efficiently make use of its resources: ‘Siemens is organised around five separate divisions, each of which have a head lawyer or Divisional GC. Below that, each business unit has a lead lawyer, who do not have teams per se but are the personal contact with the business unit operating on the business partner principle. We also have five lawyer pools with specialist expertise: one for projects, one for products, one for tech, one for corporate M&A and one for cross-business matters. And then, Siemens is active in roughly 200 countries, probably 80 of which have regional legal departments, these also have lead lawyers’. This pooling approach is a new innovation for the team, allowing greater specialist knowledge development while allowing some resource to be shifted between divisions as needed. Häring also reports that Siemens has added a new legal toolbox, including smart templates which allow the business to build contracts based on a number of inputs and then stockpile any new contract templates for future use. Among a litany of major project work undertaken by the Siemens legal function, Häring mentions his division’s settlement on the Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant in Finland as highly notable. ‘This was a particularly tricky matter’, he explains, ‘because we were in consortium with Areva which became embroiled in significant financial difficulties which led to delays in the project. The settlement ended an arbitration where we had claims against the customer of €2.3bn, and the customer came back with a €3.9bn counter claim’. Ultimately, this was settled acceptably for the Siemens side, with the three-digit million settlement amount to be paid to Finnish plant operator TVO entirely by Areva rather than Siemens.

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