About

Led by head of group legal and compliance Dr Christoph Hammerl and approximately 120-strong, the in-house legal function at The Linde Group is on one of the most impressive legal teams in Europe. Daniel Schmachtenberg, head of legal region Europe South and EMEA gave some insight into some of the major internal innovations and projects the team has led successfully over the past two years. On the internal side, he mentioned ‘the successful implementation of legal tech solution iManage to facilitate teamwork and the continuous adaptation of Linde’s group legal and compliance to client structure in transformation due to pre-merger efficiency programs, divestments and re-organisations’. As for project work, he mentioned three main areas that have generated a large volume of work for the team. ‘Firstly’, he lists, ‘legal preparatory work – due diligences, re-organisations, carve outs – regarding possible global mega-merger with competitor Praxair, subject to strict competition law requirements. Secondly, continuous client support in sometimes difficult circumstances regarding everything from day-to-day legal business, liability topics to mega “build-own-operate” projects worth Linde investments of two to three digit million euro figures. Thirdly, adaption to new data protection regulation has been extremely important to the company and required a large amount of work from the team’. Hammerl’s and Schmachtenberg’s performance has been complemented by the hard work of many other team members, including by way of example, Dr Johannes Dittrich’s lead on the competition law workstream for the proposed merger.