About

Peter Lenda is an accredited in-house lawyer with broad experience from both private and public sector working within the IT field. After being a junior researcher at the Norwegian Research Center for Computers and Law, Peter Lenda joined Simonsen Vogt Wiig, a law firm with a heavy focus on IT law. After gaining this experience, from 2007 to 2012 Lenda worked at the largest Norwegian financial institution, DNB Bank, where he worked with IT procurement and sourcing and as the senior vice president was in charge of a team running all the IT procurements, negotiations and contracts. Joining Steria as their Scandinavian general counsel in May 2012 Lenda explains that ‘despite having achieved a great position at DNB, I found the challenge to build a new legal department too tempting. I came from a very structured organisation (which is normal in a financial institution) and came to a very flat structure with great potential’. Taking advantage of this potential, Lenda went on to build a legal department from scratch, a process which taught him to understand how important it is to build trust between top management and how it subsequently provides value. ‘After two years it was a turning point. Today I have a slogan where the legal departments delivers under “Helping.Create.Value”’. Amongst his achievements, Lenda also went on to inherit a few larger conflicts with customers within the first 18 months of his career. By the first two years these conflicts were closed in a professional and efficient manner with all clients remaining important customers. ‘Conflict levels have been reduced and the reason is a professional approach to every conflict that we deliver from the legal department, even though we are only two in-house lawyers’. Aiming to make the internal legal function completely self-sufficient, Lenda makes sure to handle all legal issues internally and reduce external use of lawyers and provide assistance to the bid processes. ‘An additional part was to develop legal learning with all parts of the business – by increasing the quality of writing bids with legal understanding it reduces risk and conflict’ Lenda says.