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Switzerland Teams 2019

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Switzerland Teams 2019

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About

Microsoft’s corporate, external and legal affairs (CELA) department in Switzerland is led by director of legal affairs Jan Widmer and includes team members supporting different functions and locations such as legal and non-legal, paralegal and government affairs. The team also collaborates closely with legal colleagues from the standards and digital diplomacy group from Microsoft in Geneva. The continued growth of Microsoft’s cloud business in Switzerland, led to the announcement of the opening of two new datacentres in the country. The legal team’s daily work consists of supporting business clients in customer engagements and negotiations. ‘The key to the team’s success is the passion to work at the intersection of business, law and technology’, says Widmer. ‘Since the latter is highly dynamic and the cycle of innovation of technology continues to speed up in an unforeseen way, it’s paramount to have the mind-set to continuously educate oneself about such developments’, Widmer explains. Therefore, the lawyers are being trained on the fundamentals of artificial intelligence, algorithms and cloud platforms. The legal department also regularly trains internal clients on legal and regulatory frameworks and introduced a legal chatbot powered by machine learning to help internal clients find answers to common questions. ‘During the past years it was important to deeply engage with regulators and to build up good relationships. The key is to understand the interests of local regulators and stakeholders like industry associations and subsequently find a balanced approach that takes into account the technical architecture of cloud computing services and the business interests of a multinational cloud provider like Microsoft’, explains Widmer. The legal team has found that full transparency, understanding of the underlying goal of regulatory frameworks and the respect for each other’s opinion is a must to reach feasible solutions for all parties involved. Microsoft’s legal team also has a seat at the table of the executive management team, which is of utmost importance to effectively lead a legal department. The legal department is also involved in the broader reach-out by Microsoft to start-ups in Switzerland, where it participates in associations to help support favourable and sense-making regulation to empower the Swiss start-up ecosystem in the fintech and drone industries.

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