Team size: Four

Can you briefly explain how the legal team is structured, highlighting key individuals and their role within the department?

Deloitte Norway’s in-house legal is a separate department within the internal Enabling Areas Functions alongside the Business Areas of Deloitte. In-house legal is headed by the general counsel who reports to the CEO. Deloitte Norway forms part of the North- and South Europe region of Deloitte (“NSE”) with its approx. 70 lawyers in 27 countries. In-house legal in Deloitte Norway consists of four lawyers, who provide services to all parts of the business of the group and the Deloitte Norway companies within a wide range of areas. Each lawyer has certain important specialties: (i) Mette Stokke is the general counsel, board secretary and ethics officer, as well as the lead contract negotiator for Deloitte Norway, in particular for large scale cross boarder commercial contracts. Mette is also an employment law specialist; (ii) Tine Simonsen is a commercial contract lawyer, specialised in public sector contracts and is also specialised in anti-money laundering and counter terrorist financing matters; (iii) Mads Eriksen is the Privacy Lead for Deloitte Norway also handling regulatory matters and commercial contracts.

What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

In-house legal has recently been involved in the following transactions: (i) restructuring the Norwegian corporate structure following Brexit in close cooperation with the other Deloitte entities in Europe, which required some challenging reviews and updates of our corporate governance documents; (ii) advising on all legal aspects arising from the Covid-19 pandemic and the impact this has had on Deloitte Norway, including review of several legal issues, many of them with limited or no previous case law, nor clear answers in available legal sources; (iii) reviewing several technology solutions due to the constant development within privacy law due to the Schrems II ruling, and particularly in the intersection between information security measures, such as monitoring, and privacy law; (iv) being instrumental in the design and implementation of Deloitte’s new Anti-Money Laundring/ Counter Terrorist Financing program, which is a high focus area within our industry; (v) negotiating several large-scale cross-border contracts covering all Deloitte’s five Business Units in up to 80 countries; (vi) implementing new insider list processes to respond to new important obligations for consultancy firms caused by Norway government’s implementation of MAR (the EU Market Abuse Regulation); (vii) launching a new Supplier Code of Conduct and updating our third-party background check process to ensure that all our business relations and vendors are compliant with the high standards of ESG and Ethics that we operate under.

During the pandemic we see new ways of interacting with our clients and the market, which called for an updated policy.

Mette Stokke
General counsel
Deloitte Norway