What are the key projects you have been involved in over the past twelve months?

Over the past twelve months, I have acted as legal and compliance lead for DWS Infrastructure’s Luxembourg platform, covering the Pan-European Infrastructure Fund series and the Sustainable Growth Infrastructure Fund (SGIF) – approximately 40 fund, general partner and portfolio holding entities across sectors including renewable energy, healthcare, digital infrastructure and transport.

My core project has been running the platform’s multi-entity governance cycle end to end: quarterly board meetings across the GP, Luxco and portfolio levels, including minutes and ratification processes, in close coordination with the fund administrator. In addition, I support the Investment Committee process, ensuring decisions are properly documented at entity level.

On the transactional side, I have led the legal workstreams for a series of intra-group financing arrangements – interest-free and interest-bearing loans, rollovers and inter-company facilities deployed into portfolio and co-investment structures ensuring each funding flow was properly authorised, documented and auditable across multiple entities. This has coincided with an active transaction period for the platform, spanning both new acquisitions and exits.

The outcome is a governance and execution framework that lets a lean legal function support a large, active platform: board cycles run on schedule, financing flows close without documentation gaps, and the audit trail withstands scrutiny which, in a CSSF-supervised environment, is the real measure of in-house legal quality.

Can you describe an instance where your legal advice directly influenced business strategy or commercial objectives?

As legal director at Pears Global Real Estate, where I also served as a board member of the European SPVs, my legal input ran through the full life of each transaction. On major residential portfolio acquisitions across multiple European jurisdictions, I reviewed initial due diligence, challenged post-DD findings, worked through the financing documentation and managed the exchanges with external counsel across jurisdictions combining legal analysis with my own understanding of the underlying residential markets. That end-to-end involvement fed directly into the investment decisions: shaping whether and how we proceeded, the transaction structures, and the protections we negotiated. Sitting on the board meant I wasn’t only advising on those risks but voting on them; legal risk was weighed alongside commercial return, not after it. That experience defined how I work in-house today: the legal function is most valuable when it is inside the investment process, influencing what the business decides, not just documenting what it has decided.

Beyond your legal role, is there a cause or initiative you are especially passionate about?

Preparing the governance community for AI. Boards and legal teams will be judged this decade by how well they oversee technology they didn’t grow up with, and I want Luxembourg to lead that conversation rather than follow it. Through the Luxembourg Institute of Governance (ILA), where I serve on the board, I have co-authored publications on AI in the boardroom and on new technologies for board minutes, and I deliver training introducing directors and governance professionals to AI. I speak regularly on AI governance and EU AI Act readiness – on its implications for banks and payment systems at Nacha’s Payment Innovation Alliance in Brussels, on board oversight of AI at PwC’s NED Day, and on AI governance and board readiness at Nexus Luxembourg. What drives me is translation: taking a technical, fast-moving regulatory field and making it usable for the people who carry oversight responsibility. I also mentor through the INSEAD and ILA programmes, because governance knowledge compounds when it’s shared.

What key trends should in-house counsel be monitoring over the coming months?

Three stand out. First, AI governance. The EU AI Act’s obligations are phasing in against a moving timeline. The Digital Omnibus agreement has deferred the high-risk regime, but deferral is not exemption. Counsel should use the added time to build AI inventories, vendor confirmations and oversight frameworks rather than postpone them. The quiet risk is shadow AI: tools embedded in ordinary software, adopted without legal or compliance involvement.

Second, the reshaping of EU AML/CFT supervision. With the new EU AML package and a central supervisory authority coming into operation, in-house counsel at financial-sector and fund businesses should expect greater harmonisation but also more intrusive, data-driven oversight and should pressure-test whether their frameworks are demonstrable, not merely documented.

Third, cross-border regulatory complexity in fund structures, from AIFMD II implementation to operational resilience requirements. The common thread: regulators increasingly judge legal functions by their audit trail, so evidence of compliance matters as much as compliance itself.