About

Featuring a number of outstanding professionals including lawyers, compliance specialists and one assistant, the legal team serving Swedish private equity group EQT has members active in New York, London, Luxembourg and Amsterdam in addition to Stockholm, its main place of operation and headquarters. General counsel Lena Almefelt is joined by legal directors Petter Alberts, Paul Dali and Josefin Nowén Wirkkala in leading the team along with Magnus Sjöcrona, who is EQT’s head of regulatory and compliance. Almefelt describes the structure of the function as follows: ‘Legal is centralised and based in Stockholm. Compliance is a combination of central and local functions, where the local functions have direct reporting lines to the central compliance function in Stockholm’. Whilst the legal area deals with ‘general corporate, transaction support and capital raising’ matters, the team helps manage and maintain a panel of over 50 law firms globally in jurisdictions where EQT is active. One of the overall goals of the team is, as Almefelt puts it, ‘to provide tools and processes for the organisation to be “self-sufficient”’. In doing so, there has been a recent strengthening and reorganisation of the function with the idea to ‘free up resources within legal, to be able support the organisation further within the legal space’. This has included an increasing focus on digitalisation and automation regarding legal processes, which has extended beyond a strictly legal remit and now enables the team to affect and support the entire organisation. Almefelt explains that the function is run with a culture that requires it to be ‘solutions oriented [and] pro-active’ as well as to always be committed to ‘take ownership’. She also highlights the following: ‘The team is a fairly small team, however [it] triggers certain behaviour within the business operation and among outside legal advisers to ensure efficiency’.