SECTORinternal cohesion and team identity required to operate at such a high level. In the inaugural...

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3GERMANY TEAMS 2018 | GC POWERLIST

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For over 30 years, The Legal 500 has been analysing the capabilities of law firms across the world. In

this series, The Legal 500, in collaboration with Legal Business, GC Magazine and The In-house Lawyer, is turning its attention to the in-house function, and recognising those corporate counsel who are driving the legal business forward.

The GC Powerlist is a series of publications highlighting the most influential in-house lawyers and legal teams in business today. I would like to express my personal thanks to our sponsors BEITEN BURKHARDT for supporting this publication. A special mention must also go to the in-house lawyers that took time to speak to us throughout the process, as well as to the research team that worked on this GC Powerlist publication.

GC POWERLIST Germany Teams 2018

German in-house counsel have had an eventful past two years. New challenges – with GDPR

compliance perhaps being the most ubiquitous of these – have met with old to mean an ever-changing and demanding business environment to operate in. This has not, however, prevented German in-house counsel from supporting some of the largest transactions of recent years and continuing the reputation for in-house innovation and overall excellence that has characterised them for many years.

None of this would be possible without tireless dedication, encyclopaedic legal knowledge and excellent internal processes that the in-house legal teams within the GC Powerlist: Germany Teams 2018 display. Some of the best in-house teams globally

are contained within these pages, who discuss the creative solutions they have come up with to enable their companies’ business objectives and the methods they have used to achieve the excellent internal cohesion and team identity required to operate at such a high level.

In the inaugural edition of the GC Powerlist: Germany Teams 2018 we are pleased to highlight some of the country’s leading in-house legal teams. To compile this list, we canvassed opinions from both law firm partners and in-house counsel in the jurisdiction. We identified the most impressive teams who have utilised their legal knowledge strategically alongside business insight to make a positive impact towards their organisation’s success.

Joe Boswell, Senior research analyst, GC Powerlist series

David Burgess, Publishing director, The Legal 500 series

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GERMANY TEAMS

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CONTENTS

Sponsor message:

BEITEN BURKHARDT 4

Commercial and professional services 6

Consumer products 7

Energy and utilities 17

Financials 21

Food, beverage and tobacco 32

Healthcare 34

Hotels, restaurants and leisure 37

Industrials and real estate 38

Information technology 43

Materials and mining 48

Sports and media 51

Telecommunication services 52

Transport and infrastructure 54

Index 59

Chairman John Pritchard (Solicitor) Managing director David Goulthorpe Publishing director: The Legal 500 Series David Burgess

Head of sales: GC PowerlistGurpartap Basra

Senior key account managerRichard Henley

Research editorJames Wood

Senior research analystsMudasser AhmediJoe BoswellSara MageitJamie Rayat

Research analystPeter Tweedley

Creative director Stephen Jones

Content development coordinatorSiân Goodwin

Content development editorRyan Smith

Email: [email protected]

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As Europe’s largest economy and pioneer in terms of economic development, Germany provides domicile for many world class corporate groups and medium-sized hidden

champions. In order to maintain the competitiveness of this veritable and diverse business landscape in Germany and to provide development opportunities for these undertakings, the economic and legal environment must be continuously further developed and amended.

The year 2018, too, was characterised by ongoing changes: Turbulences within Europe but also outside the European Union have impacted the German economy. BREXIT negotiations have not yet delivered any results that would defuse the uncertainty with respect to unforeseeable developments. Even if the introduction of significant trade restrictions between the European Union and the United States could be prevented so far, the existing commercial disputes between the United States and China still have a noticeable impact on German companies as these are deeply branched at the international level. Moreover, the political situation in Germany and many other EU countries marked by instability in troubled times, where political parties score with protectionist motives, intensifies commercial uncertainties.

Nevertheless, Germany is strengthened by a stable domestic demand, reflected in a positive economic forecast of between 1.7 and 1.9%. This is primarily due to the constant consumer enthusiasm which is motivated by a low unemployment rate and wage increases. This boosts the development of German companies which moreover also benefit from the fact that Germany still remains an attractive location for foreign investors. It is striking that investments from EU countries, Russia, the US and China have particularly increased in recent years. To implement these transactions faultless and unobjectionable in legal terms, the companies need well-trained and innovative legal departments and skilled experts that are familiar and well-versed in the different national jurisdictions. For the purpose of imparting such specific knowledge,

commercial law firms such as BEITEN BURKHARDT successfully establish special competence centres for China, Russia or the United States.

Yet not only the persistently high internationalisation of German companies poses time and again new challenges to legal departments but also the German or rather the European legislator creates new framework conditions. So in the past months, for instance, German companies had to react to facts such as that the statutory minimum wage now applies without exception, the employee’s right to information was introduced, the prerequisites for the introduction of the model declaratory action [Musterfeststellungsklage] were set forth or, very specifically, the EU travel law has been adapted. The most important amendment of a law in 2018 was, however, the entry into force of the European General Data Protection Regulation. Dreaded by many, it has apparently lost its terror and so far it has not triggered the feared “wave of cease-and-desist letters”. Of course, many companies had to expand their data privacy efforts and adapt their existing processes. BEITEN BURKHARDT had also prepared many of its clients and made them ‘fit’ in the run-up; in particular our IP/IT/Media experts eloquently delivered numerous lectures in the Federal Republic.

The necessary economic and legal further development must be pushed and assisted by both commercial law firms and in-house lawyer teams to positively influence the company’s economic success. Legal practitioners should continually strive to expand their knowledge, communicate together and make the need for amendments clear and evident. We at BEITEN BURKHARDT support you with our differentiated industrial sector approach which ensures that the respective industry experts constantly expand and deepen their specific knowledge and are, thus, prepared to answer current and also urgent questions. In addition, we maintain an office in Brussels in close proximity to European legal practice which has an impact on German companies. The earlier we learn about decisions and inform our clients on the related

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Frank ObermannManaging Partner

Tel: +49 30 26471 132Fax: +49 30 26471 123

[email protected]

Contact Information:

Luetzowplatz 1010785 Berlin

www.beiten-burkhardt.com

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consequences, the sooner German companies will be able to respond to new developments. This way legal departments can quickly and in good time make their own colleagues sensitive and aware to modified framework conditions and provide training for correct behaviour.

In order to ensure that Germany’s legal industry actively promotes legal changes and the economic success of companies, it is necessary to establish an exchange at all levels and across all fields of law. Today’s legal, tax and business management issues arising from any entrepreneurial activity often require an impartial view and competent advice from a third party. Above all, however, the demand of in-house counsels to always have a competent legal expert at their side who does not differentiate fields of law, is legitimate and substantiated. And the law firms must also change their perspective and start “seeing things from a company’s angle” so that they can jointly develop solutions with in-house lawyers.

In the light of current global challenges, success in business now more than ever requires strong partners and full confidence in the innovative capacity of the entire legal industry. The GC Powerlist brilliantly features this innovative power and capacity and provides law-related company projects with an excellent stage. In-house teams of lawyers can discover new possibilities that may be applicable to own challenges, and exchange information on similar or same topics with other in-house lawyers. With its support BEITEN BURKHARDT seeks to promote the opportunities of information exchange and networking. We further sponsor projects which provide an adequate platform to discuss legal developments and respond to judicial issues. Together with you, BEITEN BURKHARDT can promote and further develop the legal industry in Germany and make it fit for the future. Therefore, I am particularly pleased to sponsor the GC Powerlist for the second time now and to get into interaction with you.

In the name of all lawyers, tax advisors and certified accountants of BEITEN BURKHARDT I would like to most warmly congratulate all lawyer teams, honoured with this year’s GC Powerlist award.

Frank Obermanni Managing Partneri BEITEN BURKHARDT i

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COMMERCIAL AND PROFESSIONAL SERVICES

LEMON GROUP SERVICES

As part of the American Omnicom Group, Lemon Group Services controls a vast shared services portfolio across Germany, and counts some of the country’s most valuable companies among its clients. Legal matters have always taken an important place at the company since its spinning off from the American DDB Group in 2015, with current general counsel Christian Unsinn taking on a managing director role in addition to his legal duties. Unsinn speaks very highly of his five-person legal function. In addition to himself, senior legal counsel Christoph Schuldt, legal counsel Martin Armbrust and Silke Karin Brand as well as legal assistant Tatjana Fischer oversee a wide portfolio of legal issues for a variety of companies; this considerable challenge is tackled by the Lemon Group Services legal team consistently and with great diligence.

EY

Sven Hähnel leads the integrated cross-border Germany, Switzerland and Austria in-house legal team of EY, which has achieved notable successes of late. Externally, among a number of project-based achievements, Hähnel explains it ‘undertook three successful acquisitions in parallel (fully absorbing our limited M&A capacities), supported the negotiations of global framework agreements with a large number of international clients, is successfully handling a mass litigation case and undertook a very successful renegotiation of our professional insurance program making it fit for the future’. Internally, according to Hähnel, the team has ‘implemented a new career tool allowing meaningful feedback for development discussions, started developing (in close collaboration with legal tech experts) a tool supporting the review of non-disclosure agreements and other contracts and adopted a new recruiting and people strategy’. The team’s internal culture, which has been so integral to its success, was described by Hähnel extremely positively: ‘We have a very diverse and international team of 30 paralegals, legal counsels, lawyers and a tax advisor and notary expert covering four countries, in which each and every member shows outstanding expertise and performance, support of each other cross-borders and continuous appetite for opportunities and challenges in a rapidly evolving working world’.

CONSUMER PRODUCTS

ADIDAS

2018 marked the end of an era for Adidas, as long-standing head of legal – and grandson of Puma founder Rudolf Dassler – Frank A. Dassler retired at the end of January. It looks set to continue its excellent performance over recent months that has seen it enjoy a number of highlights. In 2016, for instance, it announced the continuation of an agreement with the German Football Association (DFB) to continue its cooperation into 2022, successfully seeing off major rivals such as Nike and Puma in the process. As one of Germany’s most notable and successful international brands, Adidas’ legal team ensures the vast quantity of product trademarks and strategic initiations the company has are all protected in a legally compliant way. The depth of knowledge and expertise within the in-house function ensures this is realised fully.

AUDI

A major development for the Audi in-house legal team came in June 2018, with the creation of a new position within the department in response to developments in the company’s recent history which necessitate an updated approach to compliance matters. As such, the new position of chief economic criminal and antitrust law officer was adopted, and filled with the arrival of Dr Michael Moritz, formerly of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer. He promises to grow and nurture this department significantly over the coming months.

BEIERSDORF

Personal care company, Beiersdorf, manufactures personal care products and pressure adhesives, and is the owner of a number of renowned household brands, including Nivea, Elastoplast and tesa tape. The legal team is managed by legal and compliance manager Eberhard von Klinggräff, who since 2001 has been a member of the company’s corporate legal department, and between 2003 and 2013 was its corporate legal director. Bringing his strong reputation in the German and wider EU personal care and cosmetics sector to the company, von Klinggräff has guided the team and helped it achieve success in matters regarding a variety of regulatory and compliance topics.


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BMW

Characteristically, given its status as one of the key pillars of Germany’s world-renowned automobile industry, BMW – and, by extension, its legal team – has had a busy past 12 months. 2018 saw an announcement made in conjunction with Daimler that the two would merge their car-sharing subsidiaries to create a joint venture worth in excess of €1bn, in an excellent example of corporate collaboration allowing two companies the ability to leverage their respective competencies. Key personalities in the team include general counsel Dr Jürgen Reul and assistant general counsel Dr Andreas Liepe. Liepe mentioned the team’s approximately $4bn-valued deal which will see the company increase its stake in China-based joint venture BMW Brilliance Automotive from 50% to 75%, signed in October 2018. He explains this is to be ‘a landmark transaction for the entire auto industry’. This deal is a strategically important one which will increase long term cooperation with its joint venture partner Brilliance China Automotive Holdings, and further secure BMW’s significant foothold in the extremely lucrative Chinese market.

CONTINENTAL

Continental is a leading German automotive manufacturing company with specialism in tyres, brake systems, interior electronics and automotive safety. It has been in the business since the 19th century and first opened a production plant in Korbach in 1907, expanding to include a number of locations across Germany and globally. The department is managed by Dr Christian zur Nedden, who leads the department in dealing with the company’s legal and compliance agenda. Their support has proved integral to the realisation of Continental’s business transactions at home and abroad, including the launch of many new technological innovations. Amongst these projects, the legal team has assisted with the establishment of ContiSense and ContiAdapt, concepts designed to increase road safety and comfort. The team has been on hand with legal and compliance advice to keep pace with and facilitate such an innovation.

EDEKA

The Edeka Group is the largest German supermarket corporation, consisting of several cooperatives of independent supermarkets under the umbrella Edeka Zentrale, and has its headquarters in Hamburg. Leading the provision of legal advice, Dr Hubertus Nölting is known for his managerial and legal expertise, guiding the legal team to ensure all legal risks are mitigated to ensure the smooth navigation of the business through its varied challenges. Last year Edeka emptied its shelves, replacing foreign-made products from its stock with anti-xenophobic slogans, in an effort to make a point about racism and diversity. The legal function has been responsible of ensuring the smooth launch of other diversity campaigns of this nature, showing the teams’ commitment to ethical concerns and the successful rollout of strategic initiations.

CONSUMER PRODUCTS

DAIMLER

Daimler’s legal and regulatory compliance team has been extremely active of late, developing a number of comprehensive internal compliance structures over the past few years. In 2016, as associate general counsel and head of the legal and regulatory compliance team Florian Adt explains, it ‘completed the review of a global antitrust compliance programme encompassing numerous audits globally – what we put in place in terms of compliance, I am happy to say, is not only state-of-the-art but is probably setting a benchmark’. He went into further detail on some of the other innovations within this compliance programme. ‘We have created a uniform, globally valid standard on how to assess antitrust matters’, he explains, ‘which has been implemented among all countries we operate in. As part of this, we have set up an advisor hotline, guides, checklists and other practical support resources available at all times via a mobile application’. This has been integrated into a wide-ranging training programme – which the team is ‘very proud of’ according to Adt – and a very intensive monitoring effort aimed at setting standards. The team has also implemented ‘early warning systems in terms of legislation change which will allow us to align our guidance when new risks are developed’. He continues,’The result is an extra layer of risk-management abilities. The foundation for these processes is an unusual and forward-thinking team structure. My team comprises a number of people from different fields. Besides lawyers with a classic legal education, we have people with auditing, accounting and business administration backgrounds. With such an interdisciplinary team, you can provide comprehensive advice that doesn’t stop at solving a legal problem, but also takes into account strategic and operational issues, while also supporting the company’s organisation in the implementation of the advice given. To conclude: the legal regulatory compliance team protects the company and shapes the future by capturing business opportunities together with the business.’ Daimler’s legal and regulatory compliance team operates within a group-wide in-house legal structure, led by vice president and group general counsel Dr Thomas Laubert.


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FUJIFILM EUROPE

FUJIFILM’s EMEA headquarters is based in Düsseldorf and contains a highly effective multi-discipline legal team led by general counsel and chief compliance officer Oboama Addy. The team is well-known within the market for combining a corporate generalist outlook with specialised competition, M&A and regulatory compliance skills. Undertaking significant cross-border work within the team – including work in Turkey and Russia – means that the team has to be widely knowledgeable culturally as well as legally, especially given the various regulatory environments that affect the company’s supply chain.

HENKEL

The legal department of chemical and consumer goods company Henkel, is fully equipped to provide outstanding support and counsel to the business, boasting excellent knowledge in applicable laws and regulatory risk matters. Thomas-Gerd Kühn serves as the general counsel and chief compliance officer, and was initially responsible for overseeing the global chemicals business, but eventually moved over to the corporate matters department, which he took over in 2002. The legal function has assisted the company in spearheading environmentally friendly initiatives. One of which being Henkel’s collaboration with social enterprise “Plastic Bank”, which has the stated goal of collecting plastic waste before going into the ocean, and as part of the partnership three plastic collection centres in Haiti were opened last year. This project has enabled the collected plastic to be sorted, processed and then integrated into recycling value chains, demonstrating a remarkable success for Henkel and its legal department.

HSE24

HSE24 stands for Home Shopping Europe, and is a teleshopping broadcaster that was launched in 1995 under the name HOT (Home Order Television) as Germany’s first teleshopping channel, being renamed in 2001. The legal team has been prepared to deal with all legal matters during this exponential growth, dispensing high-quality legal and compliance advice, with a comprehensive remit that includes the provision of legal advice to all business partners including the management board. Günther Sailer has managed the legal department since his appointment as general counsel and executive vice president in March 2017. Recently, the legal department has been involved in talks between HSE24 and the Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC), signing a joint venture agreement to establish a home shopping company in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). HSE24 will hold a 65% stake in the Dubai-based company, making available its home shopping concept and its lifestyle product range in the Arabic language on interactive platforms in the Middle East and North Africa region. The department has assisted on the roll-out of this project, ensuring regulatory compliance and growth in a region with great market potential.

CONSUMER PRODUCTS

HUGO BOSS

Luxury German fashion house Hugo Boss was founded in 1924, and today has 900 group-owned retail stores worldwide, manufacturing clothes for men and women, as well as fragrances, cosmetics, watches and eyewear through licensed agreements. The legal department is behind enabling a number of agreements and is actively involved in the legal coordination with the rest of the business. An example of this activity is its involvement in the latest partnership with Formula E, making Hugo Boss its first apparel partner and building on the brand’s longstanding connection with motorsport. The legal team continuously contributes to the brand expansion, facilitating various partnerships and sponsorships in the last two years thus contributing to the company’s global revenue amounting to approximately €2.7bn.

HYUNDAI MOTOR EUROPE

Led by extremely well-regarded general legal counsel and chief compliance officer Hyun-Soo Kim, Hyundai Motor Europe’s eight-person legal team reported two major accomplishments among its successes over the past two years. One major change, the consolidation project; and one major innovation, the warranty change and customer protection program. On the former, the team reported that ‘during 2018, Hyundai Motor Europe has become Hyundai regional headquarters for Europe. This development was part of Hyundai Motor Company’s global reorganisation and aimed to grant regional units greater integration and empowerment, and led to all legal and compliance roles within the Hyundai European subsidiaries being consolidated into one European legal and compliance group led by our team’. On the latter, the team explained that it was forced into action by increasing unauthorised sale of new vehicles by unauthorised resellers: ‘Faced with this problem, during 2017 our team developed an innovative legal solution by applying for the first time in the automotive industry the European Court of Justice’s decision on Metro and Cartier, which allowed a manufacturer who operates a selective distribution system to limit the manufacturer’s warranty only to products which have been sold by its official network. This decision bore the unpredictable risk that every customer affected by this limitation would project the fact that the manufacturer is rejecting warranties for its own genuine product… our team developed the concept of a unique customer protection program (“CPP”). In particular, the purpose of CPP is to grant warranty based on good will in cases an end-customer bought a new vehicle from an unauthorised reseller in good faith of receiving the manufacturer’s warranty’. Alongside these extremely important projects, which showcase the team’s creativity and proactivity alongside its sound legal skills, the Hyundai Motor Europe legal function has also been intimately involved in the company’s GDPR compliance. It also had legal oversight of the launching of a new car sharing project and embarked upon investigatory work aimed at identifying and stopping hundreds of unauthorised traders from selling Hyundai products by enforcing Hyundai’s trademark rights. Alongside Kim, legal head Stefan Ritonga and compliance head Ana Fernández Cruzado came in for particular praise for the ‘integral part’ they have played in ‘not only achieving, but exceeding the targets and expectations set by senior management’.


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MAHLE

Jörg Kiefer, general counsel of MAHLE since 2008 – and employed by the company since 2001 – speaks extremely positively of his highly experienced and dedicated corporate legal department. ‘In the year 2000 the corporate legal department in Germany consisted of a general counsel and one assistant with only another legal department in Brazil’, he recalls. ‘Now, it consists of 17 individuals, including director corporate legal department automotive Julia Wagner, head of corporate legal department services Fabian Reichert, and head of corporate legal compliance Myriam Stauch’ besides the legal functions in the regions. Feeling that ‘the generalist approach is right for us’, nevertheless Kiefer reports that the company supplements this with the addition of specialists – focusing on ‘a diversity-driven approach’ when considering the individuals themselves; ‘this means not only hiring people from different genders, ethnic origins and ages but from different working histories’. This approach has proved extremely successful by all accounts, with Kiefer reporting ‘nine signed and closed M&A transactions on the buy and sell side’ over the past two years. In particular, he mentions ‘the sales of BMTS, MAHLE Motorkomponenten, MAHLE’s industrial filtration business and a 33% share in HBPO, and the takeover of Nagares’. As well as this, it has been involved in the management of antitrust proceedings, various recall and warranty claims and the implementation of a web-based whistle-blower hotline.

MEDIAMARKTSATURN RETAIL GROUP

An impressive 35-person legal department, MediaMarktSaturn Retail Group legal team has been living up to its strong reputation by successfully completing an impressive number of projects over the past two years. General counsel Manuel Sternisa provides further detail into just some of these: ‘In addition to training programs, handling antitrust investigations and claim damages and implementation of GDPR, the team has undertaken diverse M&A projects including the selling of the Russian business and has set up the European Retail Alliance as a joint venture together with French retailer FNAC DARTY’. Sternisa is keen to emphasise the collaborative nature of the teams work, saying: ‘We do not like to highlight single colleagues, as major projects are always a team performance’.

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CONSUMER PRODUCTS

METRO

German retail group METRO is a diversified retail and wholesale cash and carry group based in Düsseldorf, and is one of the largest retailers in the world measured by revenue. With 21 million customers in 35 countries, the legal department is tasked with carrying out international transactions and sales, ensuring compliance and adherence to regulatory measures. In the midst of restructuring efforts, METRO is in talks regarding putting its supermarket chain Real up for sale, in a move that will shift the former conglomerate entirely on its wholesale activities. General counsel and chief compliance officer Christoph Kaemper heads the department in advising on commercial and cross-border transactions, overseeing a team praised by sources for its collaborative qualities.

NATIVE INSTRUMENTS

Head of legal Maike Weber explains the music technology company Native Instruments legal team’s transformation to entirely digital working practices as perhaps its most important innovation of recent years. ‘We already started an electronic documents archive eight years ago when I joined the company. After evaluating the possibilities of digital signature processes last summer, we meanwhile have all our contracts with externals signed digitally. Furthermore, this led to having NDAs signed via link by non-legal team colleagues to externals’, she explains. Outside-facing projects have been equally important for the team, providing a variety of transactions for it to work on, as Weber recalls: ‘Alongside managing due diligence and getting an investment for our company in a relatively short time frame, we have launched a new business model – an online marketplace for musicians accessible for third parties as suppliers of the audio content. We also negotiated the terms for contracts with high profile partners to create long-awaited follow up versions of well-appraised products, extended our business scope in China and France by founding entities there, took over two start-ups and also supervised the biggest parallel release of products in the over 20-year long history of our company’. This incredibly impressive list of achievements was not achieved by accident, and Weber also speaks to the unique characteristics of her team that fed into its success. ‘Each of us has his or her specialities’, she says, ‘but our colleagues from the other departments do not need to take this into account as we work as a team, and all of us contribute equally to the team’.


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OTTO GROUP

Otto Group has undergone a comprehensive digital transformation over recent years, going from a catalogue company to an online-driven e-commerce, financial services and logistic services group now boasting annual turnover of more than €14bn in sales. Martin Mildner, group general counsel and global head of M&A, describes the 50-person Otto Group legal team as ‘one of the leading and most advanced European in-house law departments with a deep and outstanding knowledge on all legal aspects on e-commerce and internet-business as well as related financial services and logistics services’. Transactionally, the team has been extremely successful as well, and Mildner lists a plethora of projects the team has advised on: ‘In 2018, the team was involved in the US$300m minority investment of Heartland in Otto Group subsidiary About You, the sale of Otto Group company Blue Yonder to JDA.com and offering of a corporate hybrid bond worth €300m to the financial market. In 2017, the team participated in the sale of RatePAY to Advent International and Bain Capital, the opening of the ecommerce website otto.de and the acquisition of same-day delivery start-up company Liefery’. Among other strong team performers, Mildner mentions the impressive contributions made by Dr Simon Menke, Britta von Mutius and Dr Steffen Jaeniche. Dr Menke received plaudits for his work on data protection law, von Mutius for her commercial law work and Dr Jaeniche for his work on corporate and finance law.

PUMA

Perhaps the most prominent corporate development in sportswear giant Puma’s recent history came in 2018 when French parent company Kering announced it would be spinning off the majority of its stake in Puma (70%) to shareholders. This extremely complex project, supported ably by the company’s legal department, was completed in May and will allow the company new business options going forward. Martin Benda took over the company’s general counsel and global legal director role in April 2018, assuming responsibility for what is already a highly motivated, capable and well-respected legal team presiding over one of the worlds most recognisable brands.

CONSUMER PRODUCTS

SCHWARZ GRUPPE

Privately family-owned German retail group Schwarz Gruppe owns and operates the Lidl and Kaufland brands, and it is the fourth largest retailer in the world by revenue. The legal department have assisted on Lidl’s plans to expand its business to Australia, Lithuania in 2016, and Serbia and the US in 2017 and Russia in 2020. Schwarz Gruppe’s turnover grew 7% in the past fiscal year, up to €79.3bn. An extensive international expansion was the big catalyst for this turnover and it is here where the legal team have been critical to ensure that the company are investing strategically in its store and logistics real estate, giving advice on pivotal decisions in regards to store openings in different jurisdictions.

TCHIBO

A German chain of coffee retailers, Tchibo has over 1,000 shops and is one of Germany’s largest retail chain. Tchibo’s coffee is sold in supermarkets in the US, Canada, the Czech Republic, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey, Hungary, Ukraine, Syria, Israel, Jordan, Russia, United Arab Emirates, Poland, the UK and Lebanon. Since 2007 Philip W. Seitz has served as the company’s general counsel, assisting the company in encouraging the company’s desire to grow its coffee service business in the UK and Ireland. The legal team has been at the centre of the grand opening of a first-of-its kind Tchibo Shop & Tchibo Coffee in Dubai Mall, helping the company set up an unrivalled shopping concept that is unlike any other retailer in the Middle East.

UNILEVER

Risk management and integrity is a key part of the legal management at British-Dutch transnational consumer goods company Unilever, making up a large part of a company that pushes a culture of ethics and compliance to the front of their ethos, and has earnt the reputation of being a “responsible business”. As an advocate of this sentiment, general counsel and business integrity officer Sven Wehser focuses on leading and developing the international legal teams of Unilever, partnering with the business to support commercial teams in negotiations and transactions in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The Germany legal team has recently been responsible for the successful rollout of innovative projects that have been recognised as driving growth, thanks to strong sales in the company’s ice cream products in Germany.


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VOLKSWAGEN

Vying with Toyota for the title of largest car manufacturer in the world, Volkswagen is consistently committed to innovation and is in the midst of a major shift in philosophy as part of its Transform 2025+ strategy which will see it massively increase its portfolio of electric cars. In 2017 the company announced its first major strategic partner in this project, with Infineon Technologies providing its semiconductor expertise to Volkswagen’s electric ambitions. Volkswagen’s legal team, which has been integral to this and other projects in what has been an extremely busy period for the company, contains a number of highly respected in-house counsel; general counsel Manfred Döss being just one example of the highly dedicated, talented and business-savvy in-house lawyers the team consists of.

ZALANDO

Zalando has carved out a highly successful, multibillion-Euro revenue segment in the highly competitive e-commerce sector, thanks to a highly motivated, forward-thinking and capable team of employees; its legal function is no exception. As is – perhaps – to be expected from a legal team based in the e-commerce sector, Zalando’s legal team has earned a reputation for innovation among industry observers, particularly for its tax-based legal advice which has proved to be a major advantage for the company. Dr Ansgar Schönborn, head of corporate law, is a standout performer in the team who received plaudits from multiple sources.

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ENERGY AND UTILITIES

AMPRION

Overseeing all legal aspects of operating the longest high-voltage electricity network in Germany, with over 11,000km of network stretching from Lower Saxony to the Alps, Amprion’s legal team is regarded as among the best in the country. It is currently in a period of expansion to support the company’s ambitious plans for the future, which include the construction of a further 2,000km of network infrastructure over the next decade. This expansion, which is to be achieved in a sustainable and reliable way, has required innovative and in some cases unprecedented legal actions to be undertaken by the team; and its success in this area is a major factor in the high esteem in which it is held by the German in-house community. Kerstin Semmler is head of legal and investor relations and leads the team, and the emphasises the practicality of the team in terms of the legal advice it gives and commends it for the way it has navigated a number of obstacles to its success.

E.ON

Reportage of E.ON in the business press has been dominated by its large, highly complex and €43bn valued acquisition of innogy, as part of a voluntary public takeover offer agreed with innogy’s owner RWE. This agreement, which will see E.ON take on Innogy’s grid and retail business while RWE will take retain innogy’s and take on E.ON’s renewable energy assets, is due in large part to the efforts of E.ON’s highly effective and capable in-house legal team. Dr Guntram Würzberg leads the team, while head of legal M&A Sebastian Heidtkamp and head of corporate and finance law Dr Dermot Fleischmann can take a large amount of credit for this eye-catching deal, rated by the industry press as among the most impressive conducted across Europe over the last year.

RWE

An extremely busy year for German utilities company RWE’s in-house legal team has seen it lauded by multiple sources for its excellent performance on a number of extremely well-covered projects and transactions, most notably in relation to its subsidiary innogy. Firstly, in 2016 the team was involved in Innogy’s IPO which then led to a comprehensive restructure of the RWE legal function after this complex operation was concluded. In 2018, a monumental deal was reached with E.ON which would see the two companies acquire and split up Innogy’s assets in a multibillion- euro deal that made headlines across Europe.


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BRASKEM

Brazil-headquartered petrochemical company Braskem has two industrial plants in Germany, which acts as the base of Braskem Europe. Highly respected Brazilian lawyer Cristiane Rego moved from São Paulo to Europe to head the European legal function in late 2017, and provided some detail on the Germany-based team’s most recent successes. Currently in a period of expansion, the legal team in Germany started with Anne Zimmer focused on contracts, labour affairs and data protection, considering her extraordinary knowledge regarding German legislation. Myrela Reis is also highlighted as a notable lawyer, who took on the challenge of structuring the Frankfurt legal team. Rego lists the major improvements the team has made over the past two years as ‘the creation and putting into place of a governance program, support of the company’s global compliance program and the organisation of contract flows to guarantee the legal department’s involvement’. Alongside this, the team has been successful in the support of a number of the company’s projects, chiefly logistic division with the new operational model to product delivery through European distributors. This required ‘re-negotiating the agreements in order to get higher level of business integration leveraging local synergies’. Rego also mentions that the aforementioned Reis has been at the heart of perhaps the major governance project of recent months: ‘She has developed the most important project relating to governance: Rules of Delegation of Authorities (DoA), applicable for all team members in Europe. This means that she has reviewed each employee profile in order to define new limits and activities’.

THÜGA

Headed by Gabrielle Aplenz, the Thüga in-house legal team recently achieved approval for the company to proceed on a major business coup, announcing its capture of a 24.8% stake in Braunschweig energy supplier BS Energy, which had been approved by the local city council. This transaction, valued in the low three-digit million Euro bracket, is a highly lucrative one for the company and will see it cooperate with French energy giant Veolia in the management of the energy and utilities provider. Negotiating the complexities of this transaction – which involved a number of stakeholders – has turned heads among the German legal industry press and enhanced the reputation of the Thüga legal department.

ENERGY AND UTILITIES

INNOGY

The large and highly qualified legal and compliance team of energy company innogy currently consists of a total of 238 individuals globally (lawyers, paralegals and assistants) and is led by the highly experienced Dr Claudia Mayfeld who operates as vice president and general counsel for legal and compliance. She put the team’s greatest internal successes over the past 24 months as ‘continuous optimisation of cooperation with internal clients, continuous development of cost optimisation and cost efficiency as well as creation of cost transparency, the creation and control of juridical basic conditions for the growth business and the consistent pursuit of our insourcing strategy’. Externally, the team has been equally as active, executing a number of extremely high-value deals that put it right on the front pages of the business press across Europe with Dr Mayfield citing: ‘On the one hand the legal accompaniment of the founding of RWE International (later renamed innogy ) in April 2016 and the legal advice regarding the subsequent successful IPO of innogy in 2016, which was the biggest IPO in Germany since 16 years. On the other hand currently the legal advice to the transaction between E.ON and RWE regarding innogy’. It has achieved all this while negotiating an increasingly deepening regulatory environment present thanks to ever increasing legislation aimed at the energy industry.

UNIPER

Dr Patrick Wolff, general counsel and chief compliance officer for Uniper’s large, 112-strong legal and compliance function, lists three main project successes for the team over the past two years: ‘Firstly, we achieved the successful spin-off and listing of Uniper, a fantastic achievement for a company with a market capitalisation of approximately €10bn. We also managed major asset disposals totalling over €2bn in this time, and participated in successful international arbitration and litigation processes that resulted in awards from the industry press’. Internally, the team also succeeded in achieving ‘complete global functional integration of all legal areas into a centralised management model’, and put together a ‘highly efficient and competitive panel of law firms’ which complement the already impressive skills within the internal legal team.

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SYBAC SOLAR GROUP

Led by Konstantin Sassen, an extremely experienced general counsel with many years of experience, Sybac Solar Group’s in-house legal team is well-endowed with legal talent. Sassen mentions Laura Tyson, Tay Kutlu, Dr Eva Bauer and Svenja Haisch extremely favourably when discussing the team’s achievements. The projects on which they have excelled are numerous and varied, as Sassen lays out: ‘As well as successfully bidding on and winning several German Renewable Energy Sources Act and Ground-Mounted PV Auction Ordinance bid tenders (80MW in total), we have reorganised the company’s domestic, US and Central and Eastern European business units and sold a 35MW solar project pipeline of the Chilean subsidiary to an institutional investor. The team also sold an interest in a German-Chinese joint venture based in Hong Kong, established a new real estate development business field, sold Sybac Service to BayWa r.e. and established in cooperation with Brookfield Financial Australia a strategic partnership for the Australian market by creating a joint venture in the country’. Internally, Sassen mentions the major innovations by the team to have played a key role in ‘focusing the worldwide business model on development and realisation of solar power plants and optimising the domestic business model in light of regulatory amendments by focusing on several underserved markets and evaluating and assessing existing projects for potential third-party use as real estate development’.


FINANCIALS

ACATUS

Formed in just 2016, Acatus has already achieved what several companies take many years to accomplish, boasting a competent and knowledgeable in-house team that is fully involved with the needs of the business. An innovative fintech company, Acatus offers an efficient and reliable single asset securitisation platform with low risk profile to its customers (providing an unparalleled level of transparency and concurrent risk allocation opportunities in the process), which means its legal team is required to be agile, versatile and forward-thinking. Head of legal Ksenia Gräfin von Bassewitz explains that this new structure of doing business addresses major problems of the European debt capital market: ‘By transforming loans and other illiquid financial assets into tradable fixed income bonds, we help investors to get access to new assets and assist originators with discovering new business opportunities and managing risks more effectively’. In terms of European regulation, Acatus is well ahead of the curve given its fundamentally transparent business model, which is naturally compliant. ‘We offer a new way of securitisation without pooling and tranching. Our approach is to utilise standard procedures existing at the level of our partner service providers to the extent possible while simultaneously automating and digitising the underlying securitisation and settlement processes on our end. We have actually proved to be even more transparent than new European regulatory requirements, and as development in the market is in the direction of standardised transparent securitisation, we are ahead of the curve’, she says.

ALLIANZ

One of the Munich-headquartered financial services company Allianz’s most prominent outward-facing deals in the recent past was its announcement in June 2017 that the Turin Stadium, home of Juventus Football Club, would be renamed “The Allianz Stadium” until June 2023. This landmark deal is part of a global programme of stadium sponsorship, and will bring the total number of Allianz stadiums around the world to seven, and highlights the global reach and immense resources available to Allianz. This is underpinned by excellent support by the company’s legal team, which has played a major role in these and other important deals in addition to overseeing the day-to-day running of the company.



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AAREAL BANK

The transaction legal team of Aareal Bank comes highly recommended by nominators on the back of a highly qualified legal team of over a dozen international lawyers, its extremely well regarded team head Frederick Schönig and its consistently successful support of the company’s property lending business across more than 20 jurisdictions. Schönig shines some light on the team’s major activities over recent months: ‘The transaction legal team has recently merged with the principal credit legal team, making use of synergies out of a closer cooperation. Further, we are closely following up on any technology developments around our business and have started a first cooperation with a German “legaltech” startup recently, and is responsible for one of the significant digitalisation projects of Aareal Bank’. The team has also undertaken multiple high-value transactions over the past few years, including debt and lending facilities across Europe for values up to and including €1bn. Schönig sums up the team’s major external challenges of late to be ‘high levels of competition and therefore often higher legal complexity in the structuring of deals which tend to be larger volume cross-border deals, often consisting of special properties such as, for example, hotels’. The team’s performance is appreciated in the market as it ‘is fully committed to meet the timing requirements of the Bank’s clients and thereby safeguards closing speed and execution reliability and stands for a high quality documentation, which is particularly respected by club lenders and syndication partners’.

FINANCIALS

AURELIUS

The legal team of German financials group Aurelius has doubled in size over the last three years to its current strength of 12 individuals, and is now a consistently strong performer in the in-house legal scene on the back of its successful support of the company’s M&A, capital market and corporate affairs. General counsel Frank Forster lists the team’s major successes, highlighting the volume and variety of work the team has been successful in achieving recently. ‘We have undertaken a double-digit number of M&A transactions’, he explains, ’these being inter alia: the sale of Secop Group, Getronics Group and Studienkreis; the acquisition of Granuvit, Bertram Books, Abelan, Ideal Shopping Direct, Silvan, Privilège Marine and Wex Photography; and the launch of Aurelius Finance Company, a UK based growth and turnaround financing company’. New developments in the market which the team had to handle were in particular the ‘market abuse regulation, general data protection regulation, the ongoing trend in Germany towards use of warranty and indemnity insurances in transactions, the upcoming exit of the UK from the European Union providing unknowns increasingly making it difficult to agree on UK law and courts as law of choice or jurisdiction for international transactions’.


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BANCO SANTANDER

Due to a full immersion into the business, Timo Spitzer’s legal team (Santander legal corporate and investment banking Germany, Austria and Switzerland) at Banco Santander in Frankfurt quickly established itself as a pragmatic and commercially-minded solution provider, becoming one of the primary drivers of the bank’s success story in the region. A highlight of the year was clearly Spitzer’s award-winning lecture on international sanction provisions at Harvard Law School during the XVI Congress Harvard-Complutense on “New Finance, Restructuring and Corporate Law Challenges: A Transatlantic Perspective” in September. With assistance from his legal team, Spitzer subsequently addressed Santander’s worldwide heads of legal and corporate centre legal colleagues during the “Global Legal Days” at the bank’s global headquarters in Spain. To balance these activities with the ever-increasing demands of a fast-paced and rapidly growing business, the contributions provided by Spitzer’s team at Banco Santander form cornerstones of the legal function. Since moving to Santander in 2015, Spitzer has employed lawyers from Brazil, Bulgaria, China, France, Italy, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, Spain and Ukraine. As to the individual lawyers currently working in Frankfurt, Spitzer mentions first and foremost Cristina Repáraz Grávalos, a Spanish-qualified lawyer having previously worked for three and a half years at EY Legal in Madrid, now helping him with his transactional work to support Santander’s multinational clients headquartered in the DACH region with respect to their global corporate and investment banking portfolio, particularly syndicated and bilateral financings, export and trade finance as well as cash and liquidity management. In addition, Repáraz Grávalos assists him with his postgraduate course on international trade and export finance as an adjunct professor at the Institute for Law and Finance (ILF) at Goethe University Frankfurt. Ekaterina Eshieva supported Spitzer with, inter alia, the preparation of a speech on “Forward Thinking Legal Departments” and several international presentations. Finally, Rocío Sancho Nuño looks at anti-money laundering and compliance issues where she deals with the enforcement of sanction policies, KYC and AML rules among other matters. Prior to that she assisted Spitzer with respect to GTB and credit transactions, starting at the bank in September 2017. Sancho Nuño gained previous experience working as a corporate lawyer for Mutua Madrileña, an insurance company in Madrid, and holds a Master’s degree from the University of Mannheim. Other lawyers working in Spitzer’s department in 2018 were Iryna Karpliuk (Ukraine) and Enrico Gissi (Italy) who joined on short-term contracts and are currently pursuing opportunities with reputable US law firms. Given his impeccable reputation, Spitzer himself is extremely well regarded in the international in-house community, being a prominent feature of distinguished roundtables and lectures, and is also a GC Powerlist: Germany 2017-decorated lawyer.

FINANCIALS

COMMERZBANK

Highly regarded for its transactional capability, which it has proven time and again over the course of a number of prominent M&A deals which have been at the heart of its business strategy for many years, the Commerzbank legal team has been extremely busy of late. Perhaps the most prominent transaction the team has been involved in recently was its agreement to sell Commerzbank’s equity markets and commodities segment to Société Générale in 2018, a highly complex deal that has been managed very smoothly by the Commerzbank legal team along with its partners. Beyond its highly lauded M&A work, the team has played a major role in the bank’s comprehensive digital transformation programme named “Commerzbank 4.0”, which will see it become a market leader in this regard and is already showing signs of taking market shares from its competition.

DEUTSCHE BANK

One of the largest in-house legal teams globally, with many hundreds of individuals working in the department (approximately 300 in the German legal team alone) and highly developed internal processes, Deutsche Bank can rely on the support of a top-class function to safeguard legal matters at the Bank. In addition to being excellent managers of legal risk, the team is valued for its ability to provide constructive and practical advice to business division while looking beyond legal questions towards more commercially-focused parameters. Among a highly qualified roster of senior lawyers, Florian Drinhausen – who has held four roles with Deutsche Bank since joining in 2014 and was a GC Powerlist: Germany 2017 featured lawyer – stands out for taking on general counsel responsibilities in November 2017, while nominating sources also had high praise for Germany and wealth management general counsel Dr Thorsten Seyfried.

DEUTSCHE BÖRSE

Well-known throughout German legal circles for its excellent in-house capability which is able to deal with the lion’s share of legal challenges without recourse to external assistance, Deutsche Börse’s legal team is clearly a top in-house performer. Dr Michael Josef Lappe took on the general counsel role for Deutsche Börse in February 2018, leveraging his significant experience in complex M&A deals and corporate legal work. Its one of the most important cogs in the German financial system – and one that counts the Frankfurt Stock Exchange as one of its subsidiaries – the high level of scrutiny Deutsche Börse is subject to means the legal team’s contribution is particularly important and noteworthy.


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GENERALI DEUTSCHLAND

The legal team of Germany’s second-largest insurance company, Generali Deutschland, saw movement among its senior personnel in recent months as October 2017 saw Dr Heike Ottemann-Toyza made general counsel, bringing her wealth of experience in the sector – including many years with rival insurer Allianz – to bear on Generali Deutschland’s legal challenges. Among other efforts the team has been engaged within recent months, it has been heavily involved in the major restructuring efforts that the company has been enacting in recent months. This has involved a number of sales of subsidiaries involving high level and complex negotiations with other companies.

HYPOVEREINSBANK (UNICREDIT BANK)

Fifth largest of the German financial institutions according to its total assets and fourth largest bank in Germany according to its number of employees, HypoVereinsbank (HVB), also known as UniCredit, is an Italian-headquartered bank with a worldwide presence. In Germany it provides several types of financial services spanning consumer and SME banking, corporate and investment banking, private banking and leasing through its various subsidiaries in the country. Executive vice president and head of legal, corporate affairs, Dr Andreas Früh is known in the market for his excellent legal support and corporate focused counsel. The legal team has been central to the large undertaking of HVB’s restructuring efforts and have been commended for their efforts during the split of the bank’s legal and compliance teams, which were previously held under the same business unit.

INTER HANNOVER

Property and casualty insurance company, Inter Hannover is wholly owned by Hannover Re, within the business model there are two distribution channels to approach the insurance market -delegated authority and single risk. Based in Germany, the legal department support the global risk coverage and assist matters involving the company’s branches in the UK, Australia, Canada and Sweden. The legal department ensure that the insurance company is acting in compliance with applicable foreign legal and regulatory requirements when conducting its worldwide business activities. In 2014, the legal division was tasked with assisting in the relocation of its primary insurance subsidiary, Inter Hannover, from London to Hannover. This was the first time that a European insurance company made use of this opportunity to change its legal seat to another EU member state under the legal form of a Societas Europea (SE). Head of legal and compliance, Julia-Christina Friedrich lead the legal department through this critical move and was responsible for building up a new compliance organisation at the new headquarters in Germany. The team have since had to adjust legal and compliance polices and processes to both the German jurisdiction and to the new Solvency II regime.

FINANCIALS

IKB DEUTSCHE INDUSTRIEBANK

Led by general counsel Ulrich Freitag and with three core teams and 18 individuals, the IKB Deutsche Industriebank legal team has been striving for ‘operational excellence, top-standard legal advice and high-quality legal risk management at minimal cost’, according to Freitag. Major steps to achieving this were ‘a new open-space office environment optimising information flow in the deal teams and working groups, the implementation of state-of-the-art full digital workflow and know-how management and a broad range of legal education to maintain and broaden legal competence’. As for project work, Freitag reports that alongside complex litigation, the team has been engaged in two important M&A transactions including the sale of IKB Leasing Group, and the ‘successful restructuring of IKBs Hybrid Capital Instruments, issuance of subordinated debt, restructuring of IKB Group and thereby significant reduction of Group companies and the implementation of new MiFID-rules’. Freitag speaks extremely positively of the legal talent available to his team, mentioning two individuals specifically: ‘Christina Wolff has provided outstanding corporate law work and generated significant cost savings in her overseeing of Group restructuring and Group company reductions, while Marco Witting has implemented new working group structures and did core legal and project management for hybrid capital restructuring transactions’.

ING-DIBA

The ING-DiBa legal team was described by nominating sources as ‘a target-oriented team capable of good cooperation and achieving very precise and accurate work’, highlighting the excellent reputation it enjoys within the German in-house counsel community. In 2018, the team continued its enviable record of success with its support of the company’s acquisition of online credit market Lendico, securing a new position in the Fintech industry in the process. Manfred Schick, Sebastian Graf and Christian Schramm were named specifically by nominating sources for their extremely strong contribution to the team’s success.


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ING GERMANY WHOLESALE BANKING LEGAL

Dennis Heidschmidt’s wholesale banking legal team for ING Germany consists of 18 lawyers and is a strong player in the German financial legal sector. Heidschmidt speaks incredibly highly of his team for both its internal efficiency and commercially-focused advice: ‘My wholesale banking legal team includes colleagues who are qualified in four jurisdictions and is known for high quality, speed and its willingness to step out of their comfort-zone. Alongside this, we have been awarded team prizes for our innovation and customer-centricity’. The team as a whole prizes soft-skills in addition to pure legal talent, emphasising personal ownership, excellent communication and good judgment in its lawyers; this has clearly played a part in the team’s success.

JLL GERMANY

Team lead for German legal and compliance for Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) Antonios Kotsis explains that the function has been emphasising flexible working methods of late, with team members empowered to work outside the office if need be. Nevertheless, an extremely strong and closely-knit team culture has been developed, as Kotsis explains: ‘What we concentrate on is sharing information with each other, so that we have a supportive atmosphere and very proactive method of dealing with challenges. If something is not progressing as they should, this is brought up straight away so that solutions can be found. We stay focused, are very open and loyal to each other and are mindful that our work is not about individuals but the company’. As well as taking an active role in legal training throughout the firm via its “legal ambassadors” programme aimed at outlining the benefits of a legal insight to business matters, Kotsis speaks to a number of major projects that the team has worked on, both internal and external, over the past two years: ‘On the compliance side, we established a compliance management system that has been externally audited and is now certified to the newest standard, which is unique in the real estate industry. We also set up a group called the legal and compliance initiative with other interested companies in our sector – including competitors – aimed at setting up common industry standards with regards to AML procedures’. On the legal side, he mentions that the team has overseen ‘four major acquisitions in different sectors from asset management to fit-out businesses to brokerage companies: three in Germany and one in Switzerland’. Kotsis is very keen to emphasise the role played by former legal and compliance lead Dr Ingo Seidner – now EMEA compliance and integrity management lead – in the formation and building of the team’s capabilities to its current extremely high level of competence.

FINANCIALS

KFW

A highly capable legal team regarded as one of the best in Germany by local legal press, KfW maintains a legal team of 85 organised across three departments. The department is further subdivided into eight teams dealing with, inter alia, the domestic business of KfW as well as international projects and export financing, financial cooperation with developing countries, insolvency and restructuring, litigation, KfW’s refinancing and derivatives, corporate housekeeping and banking supervision law, public procurement law and IT law. General counsel Dr Karsten Hardraht is in charge of the team and mentioned its most important projects completed to be ‘transaction consulting for international export and project financing with a total volume of €13.8bn in 2017, legal advice with regard to financial cooperation with developing countries for a total volume of €8.2bn in 2017, the acquisition of a 20% stake in the German high-voltage energy network operator 50Hertz Transmission on behalf of the Federal Government of Germany and participation in the set up and launch of the Connecting Europe Broadband Fund among other investors’. In terms of its internal achievements and how it has improved the abilities and efficiency of the team, Dr Hardraht mentions the ‘restructuring of the legal department and implementation of a third hierarchy level, the reshaping of the legal department’s role in controlling legal risks and the establishment of a group-wide legal board to coordinate legal issues within the group’. Dr Hardraht has also strengthened the ability of his legal team to face the challenges of digitisation by way of appointing a coordinating legal expert focussing on legal advice in this new and specific area of law and on the implementation of legal tech applications within the legal team. KfW’s panel of external law firms which has been newly structured in 2018 is administered and monitored by a central legal operations team which is directly reporting to Dr Hardraht. Promoting innovation externally and internally as well as a truly enviable list of transactions worked on recently, further plaudits look set to roll in for the extremely successful KfW legal team.


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KLARNA GROUP

Dr Miyu Lee, legal director of Klarna Group, waxes lyrical about the ‘exceptional field’ she and her team are working in, which she regards as ‘one of the most exciting for an in-house lawyer to operate in because it is very fast-paced and rapidly growing’. It is by no means easy, however. Given the ‘tech-focused, agile, state-of-the-art’ nature of the teams work, combined with operating in one of the most difficult regulatory environments imaginable – and one that is not necessarily geared up for a forward-thinking company given it is based around established banking systems which Klarna Group looks to supersede – means that the team only recruits the most suitable lawyers. Dr Lee says that to succeed in this environment, which she sees as extremely appealing to those who are able to manage its demands, an in-house counsel must ‘be able to move on from just doing legal research; one must act in an agile way and be able to create exciting products’. It is this that allows Klarna’s in-house legal team to maintain an extremely significant role in the company’s fortunes; external counsel simply do not understand the business to the same level as its own legal team. ‘External lawyers will often just say something cannot be done’, says Dr Lee. ‘Offering business focused advice with viable solutions is the most difficult part of our job, and must be trained over the course of years, so it is understandable we would be able to do this better than external advisors.’

LANDESBANK BADEN-WÜRTTEMBERG (LBBW)

A highly respected legal function operating in the unique German Landesbank sector of state-owned banks, Landesbank Baden-Württemberg (LBBW)’s legal team is led by head of legal Oliver Lier and has been active on a number of projects lately. In 2018, for instance, the company launched a joint venture promissory note platform with Börse Stuttgart called Debtvision, with the platform already being used for a number of high-value transactions. Nominators also pointed out the team’s excellent contribution to the bank’s endeavours made by group chief compliance officer Hartmut Renz given the complex regulatory environment the bank operates in.

FINANCIALS

UBS ASSET MANAGEMENT

Markus Ratz, head of legal transactions EMEA for UBS Asset Management has been taking an innovative approach to its use of external counsel: ‘We decided to set up an exclusive engagement with one major law firm to guarantee a global standardised set of templates and enabling them and us to closely work together; this has allowed us to significantly increase the output of external counsel’. Ratz, supported ably by deputy head Melanie Schumann covers asset management legal for the company EMEA-wide, and explains that the team has seen a major expansion of its role in recent years, initially covering continental Europe real estate transactions and then moving on to transactions across all asset classes, including in UBS’ home country of Switzerland. To achieve this, Ratz is clear that the team needs ‘very experienced and specialised lawyers’ given the fact that the team has to deal with highly competitive markets which require the team to act ‘substantially quicker’ than contemporaries, working on a more speculative basis than other in-house teams.

WERTGARANTIE GROUP

WERTGARANTIE Group is a fast, straightforward and customer oriented insurance organisation domiciled in Germany: Since 1963, WERTGARANTIE has demonstrated how to be a successful insurer for consumer electronics, household appliances, bicycles and pets. Since its foundation the Group has grown across Europe and became a leader in its niche business of extended warranty and insurance. The Group has a compact but nevertheless highly effective legal team covering a broad spectrum of areas that plays an integral role in ‘making things happen, providing innovative solutions and enabling the business to grow profitably within the legal regulatory framework’, explains Torsten Hildebrand who is in charge of leading the team as the Group’s general counsel since 2017. He enjoys a vast experience in the field having more than 10 years of expertise in legal, regulatory and compliance matters in the insurance industry and leading teams. The legal team of WERTGARANTIE is handling the regulatory and corporate requirements impacting the Group. It is deeply involved in the business activities and has proved itself to be capable of overseeing legal support of distribution schemes and products resulting into six million customer relationships that the company possesses across Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Belgium. Hildebrand mentions that compliance with the Solvency II directive especially the governance requirements as perhaps the foremost among the regulatory challenges faced by the team. In addition to the individual skills of the team’s lawyers the team itself is in the process of becoming familiar with and adopting legal technology and taking advantage of current trends to deal with standardised processes. Preferring not to single out specific team members as ‘all team members are contributing to the direction of the legal department and the direction of the organisation within their capacities’, Hildebrand mentions that in addition to compliance with Solvency II, the team’s greatest achievements since 2017 are re-organising the corporate structure of the Group, setting up and formalising a new support unit for the boards, identifying a panel of external lawyers for international business, ensuring company compliance to GDPR and implementing the Insurance Distribution Directive.

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35GERMANY TEAMS 2018 | GC POWERLIST GC POWERLIST | GERMANY TEAMS 2018

FOOD, BEVERAGE AND TOBACCO

KRÜGER GROUP

Established in 2015, the KRÜGER Group legal team has made an undoubtedly positive impact on the company’s fortunes since then, establishing itself successfully within the business. General counsel and head of M&A Martin Fröhlich goes into just some of what this entailed: ‘The process of establishing a new legal and tax department from scratch for the entire, international and decentralised Group is an ongoing challenge and task that still continues. Our daily business covers a broad range of activities: highly complex M&A transactions such as the acquisition of the brands MaxiMuscle and MaxiNutrition from GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in the UK, handling the day-to-day business of an internationally-active and continuously-growing multi-business group of companies, and providing, quick, business-savvy decisions and delivering hands-on advice to problems arising spontaneously in a family-owned business’. Now firmly part of the corporate makeup of the company, the legal team has consistently contributed excellent results to strategically important projects. In terms of deals, Fröhlich mentions that ‘the most important and most time consuming deal was the acquisition from GSK the business with the brands MaxiMuscle and MaxiNutrition’. The acquisition of these popular and well-established UK businesses was ‘a key element of the establishment of a new business division with Healthy Foods for the European market, a rapidly growing billion Euro sector’. Alongside this, he mentions that ‘the KRÜGER Group legal department negotiated long-term co-manufacturing agreements of strategic importance for the Group in order to utilise the KRÜGER Group’s production capacity with strong international brand players’. Alongside Fröhlich, Kai Piepenstock is mentioned as having made a particularly important contribution to the team’s efforts, given his ‘outstanding expertise in tax and financial matters’.

FOOD, BEVERAGE AND TOBACCO

HARIBO GROUP

One of the best-loved and most popular confectionary brands in Europe, HARIBO operates factories across the continent and announced in 2017 the opening of its first factory in the US. This important event, overseen by HARIBO’s legal team, saw the company establish a further foothold in the extremely lucrative market. Klaus Cannivé is head of legal and compliance – (national and international) and takes charge of a multi-disciplinary team that has been steadily expanding its capability in recent years. It operates an “open door” policy for team members and stakeholders, prizing accessibility as well as clear advice and communication through the development of a proactive team culture.

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HEALTHCARE

B. BRAUN GROUP

Led by highly respected general counsel Volker Daum who is a major advocate of the use of legal technology, the B. Braun Group legal team is at the forefront of digital and technological solutions to in-house legal challenges. This, along with a finely-honed set of internal processes has had a highly positive effect on the team’s efficiency. When combined with an extremely close working relationship with senior management and direct reporting line for Daum to the company’s CEO, means that the B. Braun legal team is highly agile, commercially-focused and fully integrated with the strategic goals of the businesses.

BAYER

Bayer maintains a vast and highly capable law patents and compliance (LPC) department with almost unparalleled resources. When taking into account compliance and insurance professionals as well as paralegals and support staff alongside lawyers, the total global headcount for the function is approximately 950 individuals; 110 lawyers are based in Germany. Dr Gabriel Harnier takes on overall responsibility for this “global in-house law firm”, which has taken major steps in recent years to cementing a unifying culture, vision and mission statement for the vast function, as senior counsel Christine Bernard explains: ‘An important challenge was to further align the team of LPC to be “one team – one face – one focus” within Bayer worldwide and to support the business not only as pure legal counsels but also as business partners’. In order to achieve this, six main tenets of this initiative were adopted: ‘These were the creation of a unifying mission statement and vision for the LPC department, the creation of a knowledge management platform which all team members have access to, a global business partnering project, the creation of the LPC academy as a centre of development and learning, the creation of a strategy and community department and the implementation of a new contract management system including the pre-signing phase’. Externally, Bernard lists just some of the major projects the team has worked on, including the acquisition of Monsanto, the divestiture of Bayer’s shares in Covestro, the preparation and implementation of DSGVO and participation some arbitration cases.

HEALTHCARE

FRESENIUS MEDICAL CARE

A world leader in renal dialysis machines, Fresenius Medical Care (FMC) is known as one of the fastest-growing companies in Germany, posting €17.7bn in revenue in 2017. The company successfully issued a €500m bond in 2018 as part of a multibillion-Euro Medium Term Notes program aimed at financing Dax companies; this project was supported ably by FMC’s legal team. Key personnel within the function include director, head of special projects and associate general counsel EMEA Mark Adolphs and new addition to the team Julia Zange who was appointed head of labour law in early 2018.

MERCK

Providing legal support and governance management to Merck’s boards and a legal business partner to Merck Group functions (including finance, M&A, procurement and HR), the Merck group legal services department is 23-strong and led by Dr Stefan Fandel. Group general counsel Dr Friederike Rotsch reports that the Merck group legal services legal team ‘has handled the biggest re-structuring within Merck ever, thereby completely changing the face of the parent company and putting it on the next level of development. In addition the team has worked on a multibillion divestiture which was by far the most complex M&A transaction in Merck’s history including the involvement of numerous functions and countries’. Internally, the team has ‘introduced a flexible work allocation model in which lawyers work on projects, transactions, etc. where their support is most needed, and is also at the forefront of digitalisation efforts’. Alongside Dr Fandel, Sonja Hilge, Alexander Werner and Rose Brounts were singled out for praise by Dr Rotsch. Hilge was lauded for her corporate governance expertise, Werner for his stewardship of the labour law team and Brounts for her deep knowledge and expertise in M&A transactions.

BOEHRINGER INGELHEIM

Maintaining the safe operation of one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies requires its legal team to possess both breadth and depth of legal knowledge and specialist skills to succeed in this highly regulated and competitive industry. Alongside this, innovation is at the core of everything it does, and the Boehringer Ingelheim legal function is perhaps at the very forefront of in-house innovation globally considering its dedicated innovation team within the department. Alongside an automated contract tool which enables greatly increased efficiency for contractual work, this team has also been looking into the possibility of putting swarm intelligence principles to work on legal work with potentially dramatic positive results to come in the future. Dr Martin Schwartz is group general counsel and overall head of the legal function at Boehringer Ingelheim, and can look back on an extremely successful year for the company that has seen it stand out as among the best legal teams in Germany according to the legal business industry press.


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SANDOZ

‘Andreas Schillack, head of legal for Sandoz Europe’, a nominating source writes, ‘covers all aspects of pharma in-house legal counselling, leveraging upon his more than 20 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry. His company has been the only pharmaceutical company that has reacted with a long-term strategy to the tender procedures of public health funds’. This quote provides insight into the excellent reputation enjoyed by the Sandoz in-house legal team and its senior leadership, especially Schillack and German legal head Michael Groh. Schillack himself mentions a number of successful projects the team has been involved in over the past two years, listing these as ‘several business development and licensing deals, successful product launches, including commercial excellence tools, market access for pharmaceutical products and various legal compliance initiatives’. Feeding in to this excellent recent record, Schillack reports a highly productive internal team atmosphere: ‘All team members have greatly implemented a comprehensive team spirit of courage, collaboration, trust and integrity, innovative legal thinking and high quality approach and performance. This drives forward both the legal team’s cooperation and proactive pragmatic support of the business functions’. All this has been in conjunction with a comprehensive regional restructuring and the implementation of several knowledge-sharing tools as part of a digital expansion.

MERCK LEGAL HEALTHCARE

Merck legal healthcare provides legal advice and support to the healthcare business sector at Merck, and comprises a particularly large proportion of Merck’s overall group legal operation at over 90 members globally. Dr Monika Dorda leads the team, with other key members of the team being named by group general counsel Dr Friederike Rotsch as Vanessa Westphalen, Reinhild Roegner and Tobias Greven. Rotsch shines some light on the internal innovations made by the Merck Legal Healthcare team in the past two years: ‘The team had to adapt to several organisational changes in the Healthcare BS. Moreover, increasing demands but (more or less) flat resources make a constant re-allocation and re-focusing of resources necessary’. She also speaks to the externally focused project work that the team has been integral to. ‘The team had to prepare the business and now supports the launch of two new major Merck pharmaceuticals’, she explains. ‘Moreover, the team supports our R&D activities which are complex and focus on a pipeline for the next successful launches. Last but not least the team actively drives our licensing and partnering activities in the area of healthcare’.

HOTELS, RESTAURANTS AND LEISURE

REWE GROUP

Successfully overseeing legal support for tens of thousands of supermarkets and hundreds of thousands of employees on behalf of one of Germany’s foremost supermarket chains has led to REWE Group’s legal function developing a fantastic reputation across Europe. Recently the legal team has surpassed even its usual standard by completing a number of notable projects of strategic importance for the company. In 2017, a joint venture was announced between REWE Group and REWE Dortmund to tie the latter to the former’s overall corporate structure in order to decrease friction losses and improve corporate cohesion group-wide.

TUI GROUP

TUI Group is an Anglo-German travel and tourism company which owns travel agencies, hotels, airlines, cruise ships and retail stores. Exceeding its financial goals recently, it was on track to meet its forecasts for earning growth. This is in part thanks to the legal team which is led by group legal director legal, compliance and board officer, Dr Hilka Schneider, who is in charge of these areas as well as the M&A activities of the Holding and functionally manages the legal departments of TUI Group’s operating companies worldwide. Under her management, the team assist on various mergers and joint ventures in Germany. Most recently the legal department has assisted the tour operators in setting up its own travel agencies in Malaysia, helping the company receive its ticketing licenses from the Tourism, Arts and Culture Ministry in October 2018.


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INDUSTRIALS AND REAL ESTATE

BOMBARDIER TRANSPORTATION

As well as emphasising the innovative nature of the Bombardier Transportation legal team in terms of legal technology – they have started ‘to challenge the status quo through the changes that digitalisation will bring to products and services in the rail industry’ – head of group corporate, M&A and legal affairs Alexander Steinbrecher also mentions the ‘revised approach to managing external law firms and legal spend’ that his department has led in recent months: ‘The aim is not to work with a panel of global law firms, but to follow the principle of thinking globally and acting locally; defining a globally consistent way of engaging external lawyers, but hiring individual lawyers locally to ensure high quality and cost control’. As for the team’s project work, Steinbrecher mentions that ‘the team has worked and continues to work on global outsourcing projects, continues to handle M&A matters in various jurisdictions and takes an active role in optimising the corporate structure of the over 150 legal entities through which the group company operates’. The team is perceived as a highly engaged and committed business partner and guardian in all of its other legal affairs at Bombardier Transportation. Jana Sauer, Iris Weber, Holly Roper, Susanne Muck and Dirk Sievert are members of the team who are well recognised in the legal community and have been key to the department’s success over recent months.

BOSCH

Dr Sebastian Biedenkopf reports that his Bosch legal team continues to prosper. Successfully dealing with a high volume of day-to-day workload, it nevertheless is efficient enough to execute some prominent deals in conjunction with this. Biedenkopf has undertaken a comprehensive restructure of the team since taking over in 2013, taking on internal feedback from the business units to ensure the team was both commercially-focused and managing legal risk. He has also expanded the team substantially while retaining the cooperative culture that was so integral to the team’s success in the past. So called business- and regional teams mirror the corporate and regional structure of Bosch providing every Bosch business unit with a dedicated legal counsel. The business and regional teams are supported by expert teams dealing with areas such as antitrust, M&A IP law and litigation.


HENSOLDT GROUP

A global pioneer of technology and innovation in the area of defence and security electronics, Hensoldt is a market leader in civilian and military sensor solutions. As an organisation that develops new products to counter evolving threats based on disruptive concepts in tech fields, the legal department are required to maintain the utmost knowledge in the areas of big data, robotics and cyber security. Hensoldt considers its employees to be the most valued asset and gives priority to developing them further, this is also reflected in the fact that the legal function are continuously encouraged to develop new ideas for innovative solutions. Since March 2017 they have been managed by general counsel, Solms Wittig who leads the department towards spearheading new business opportunities to maintain it as an optimally positioned organisation and major player in the cyber warfare environment.

LUFTHANSA TECHNIK

Undertaking a comprehensive restructure over the past 24 months aimed at refocusing the team’s efforts along regional lines as an extension of the overall company’s strategy, Lufthansa Technik’s legal team – led by general counsel Dr Frank Bayer – continues to achieve excellent results in support of the business. Olaf Johannsen, head of legal for the Americas gives a bit of background into the team’s project work: ‘Without being able to go into details, it is fair to say that the larger project and cooperation agreements, often exceeding the €1bn mark, as well as the digitalisation and innovation initiative of Lufthansa Technik required most of our capacity in the last two years’. He is also extremely positive about the internal culture of Lufthansa Technik, and how this has contributed to its recent successes. ‘For me, the outstanding fact about all members of my legal team is that each member acts on behalf of the team and is truly living the idea of “driving business” rather than giving theoretical legal advice’, he explains. ‘The setup that every team member acts as a dedicated counsel for one of our American subsidiaries has been developed together and fits perfectly in the fields of specialisation of each team member’.

GEA GROUP

Global equipment and process technology provider for the food industry and a wide range of industries, GEA Group operates with 18,000 employees worldwide as of December 31, 2017. Generating around 70% of its revenue in the food and beverages sector the organisation requires a legal department that is versed in the food sector and its long-term sustainable growth. The legal department has assisted in making the organisation a market and technology leader in its business areas by adopting a strong legal and compliance unit, at hand with top-quality advice and support. Newly elected, head of corporate legal affairs Katrin Kerschbaumer has led the team to handle projects within related fields of sustainable growth since joining the company in December 2017.


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PGIM REAL ESTATE

Head of legal for Germany and Luxembourg Matthias Meckert reports that the PGIM Real Estate legal team, globally 25-strong and responsible for legal support of the company’s gross assets under management of US$69.6bn as of 31 December 2017, is ‘highly integrated in all business operations’ and is a central part of the corporate structure. In relation to Continental Europe he lists the changing regulatory environment, ‘particularly with the new generation of regulations such as AIFMD, GDPR and the (indirect) impacts of MiFID2’ to be key challenges faced by the team, as is the need to be extremely capable in terms of legal and business ability to make use of ‘complex investment scenarios which are only feasible for highly experienced real estate investors’. This high level of ability is also shown through the company’s involvement in ‘a large number of complex real estate transactions involving Sharia compliant structures, purchases from insolvency transactions in multiple jurisdictions involving international investors, complex joint venture structures and forward deals’. These real estate transactions – totalling over €2bn over the course of 2017 – most prominently included the acquisition of Austria Campus for an approximately €500m forward commitment, the sale of the company’s Quest portfolio for €400m and the acquisition, development, reletting and sale of Junghof Plaza, a prominent office building in Frankfurt, which was ‘one of the most prominent deals in Frankfurt and which was re-developed and re-let in 2017 with a high level of legal involvement’.


SIEMENS

With an overall headcount of approximately 1,500 individuals, Siemens’ legal firepower is comparable to a significant dedicated law firm. Jörg Häring, general counsel for Europe and Africa and general counsel for the power and gas division, explains how this large operation is organised to most efficiently make use of its resources: ‘Siemens is organised around five separate divisions, each of which have a head lawyer or Divisional GC. Below that, each business unit has a lead lawyer, who do not have teams per se but are the personal contact with the business unit operating on the business partner principle. We also have five lawyer pools with specialist expertise: one for projects, one for products, one for tech, one for corporate M&A and one for cross-business matters. And then, Siemens is active in roughly 200 countries, probably 80 of which have regional legal departments, these also have lead lawyers’. This pooling approach is a new innovation for the team, allowing greater specialist knowledge development while allowing some resource to be shifted between divisions as needed. Häring also reports that Siemens has added a new legal toolbox, including smart templates which allow the business to build contracts based on a number of inputs and then stockpile any new contract templates for future use. Among a litany of major project work undertaken by the Siemens legal function, Häring mentions his division’s settlement on the Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant in Finland as highly notable. ‘This was a particularly tricky matter’, he explains, ‘because we were in consortium with Areva which became embroiled in significant financial difficulties which led to delays in the project. The settlement ended an arbitration where we had claims against the customer of €2.3bn, and the customer came back with a €3.9bn counter claim’. Ultimately, this was settled acceptably for the Siemens side, with the three-digit million settlement amount to be paid to Finnish plant operator TVO entirely by Areva rather than Siemens.

MANN + HUMMEL GROUP

The MANN + HUMMEL Group legal team has been active in supporting the company’s activities of late, being a key component of a number of strategic projects that have proved successful for the company. In July 2017, for instance, it announced an agreement to acquire the companies Jack Filter Lufttechnik and Jack Filter Hungaria, both companies which will allow MANN + HUMMEL to expand its air filter product range. General counsel Anja Kahle has been in charge of the legal function since April 2016, and brings a very impressive set of legal skills to the team, particularly in corporate and commercial law as well as compliance and M&A work.

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THYSSENKRUPP

The 210-strong thyssenkrupp legal function has been a powerful force for innovation within the company, as group general counsel Arne Wittig explains: ‘During the past two years, thyssenkrupp’s legal department (LEX) has been a strong driver for change, enabling thyssenkrupp to set the course for the future. Most recently, the signing of the joint venture between thyssenkrupp Steel Europe and Tata Steel Europe has set the course driving the transition from a steel group to a diversified industrial group. In June 2018, Tata Steel and thyssenkrupp signed the agreement to combine their European steel operations in a joint venture’. Another important transaction for the legal M&A team was the sale of the Brazilian steel mill CSA Siderúrgica do Atlântico to the Latin American steelmaker Ternium, completed in September last year. It has also been heavily involved in improving corporate governance structures within the Group via a harmonisation and optimisation process. ‘Furthermore’, Wittig adds, ‘the legal team has also shaped its own strategy and operations. In a comprehensive approach based on two pillars, an extensive LEX-internal change project (LEX 2020) and the establishment of a strategy and operations department with global responsibility, the legal department has been able to upgrade its own setup, processes and tools’. Among the particularly large and highly-qualified team is Dr Martin Schlag, Dr Martin Klein and Dr Hans-Jürgen Schlinkert whose recent work marks them out as being particularly noteworthy. Dr Schlag leads the company’s legal M&A team and so has been intensively involved in the most important strategic transactions. Whilst Dr Klein leads group wide project governance and is responsible for the aforementioned improvements in corporate governance and Dr Schlinkert is head of legal for components technology and the high-profile legal framework working group.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

CALYPSO TECHNOLOGY

Calypso Technology’s acquisition by private equity firms Bridgepoint and Summit Partners in 2016 was perhaps the most prominent project undertaken by its lean and extremely effective legal department recently, though legal director Oliver Hengeler explains that this was just the start of a series of accomplishments by the team since then: ‘Last year we acquired a minority stake in Sernova Financial, and also played a key role in conjunction with the cloud team on the company’s ISO 27001 information security certification’. The team is also gearing up for an increased usage of technology in its ranks in the near future, and has recently revamped its contract approval process – this innovation has had a significant corresponding effect on the team’s efficiency. This, combined with a selective attitude when hiring new lawyers to the team – with ‘strong team players and those with business acumen’ prized – has been a major factor in the team’s success. A further challenge for the Calypso Technology legal team is the company’s exposure to the effects of increased economic sanctions by the US on certain business partners. Hengeler explains that this has required the team to ‘do due diligence on partners and clients and spend more on that area. We have also tightened our export controls policy beyond entities or individuals we would usually do this with’. Hengeler was also keen to mention senior corporate counsel Hope Straw ‘who handled a number of high-profile and significant transactions this year under difficult demands’.

SAP

Enterprise software giant SAP made headlines in 2018 with a marquee transaction that saw it take significant steps in bolstering its cloud-based services. In April, the company announced its successful completion of a $2.4bn deal to acquire Callidus Software (trading as CallidusCloud) and its portfolio of cloud-based customer relationship management software products, giving it a leading position in the market against its competitors. Unsurprisingly, SAP’s legal team has received high praise as a result of its contrbution to this landmark deal. Michael Junge is executive vice president and group general counsel, and has played a key role in progressing the SAP legal department to its current extremely high level of capability.


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HEWLETT PACKARD ENTERPRISE (HPE)

In July 2015 Dennis Grabherr took charge of HPE’s North Europe legal team comprising of a total of over 20 lawyers spread out over ten jurisdictions. This team was essential in the regional implementation of what has been referred to as ‘the largest corporate separation of recent years’: the split of Hewlett-Packard Company into two separately listed entities, HP Inc. and HPE, with most of the work being handled in-house. Then, in 2016, the team was instrumental in the divestiture of HPE’s outsourcing division (ES) and its software business. The coordination of these endeavours at global and local level was challenging and included the set-up and sale of numerous legal entities, the transfer of thousands of employees and the novation of a multitude of supply and customer contracts – all whilst keeping costs under control and meeting globally set time lines. These and further M&A transactions over time kept the North Europe legal team extremely busy in parallel to overseeing the ongoing commercial legal support of the business. In order to achieve success here and on other notable projects, the lawyers in his team are ideally suited to the organisation both in terms of ability and personality. ‘Besides strong legal skills we have colleagues with the ability to think across functions, to network and be the opposite of a lone legal opinion writer – we need the lawyers to have a hands on approach. Our initial focus is on immediate relevant legal and commercially translatable skills without sacrificing neither the quality of the legal work nor the integrity of the in-house lawyers’, Grabherr explains. Allied to this, consistent improvements in internal processes have been achieved via, for instance, the structured use of contract lifecycle tools which link various internal functions together on one harmonised platform. In addition, the HPE-sponsored legal pro bono work passionately performed by all HPE legal team members and dedicated to charitable institutions across the region is not just highly motivational but also a demonstration of HPE’s corporate values put into action.


KONICA MINOLTA

In 2014 Konica Minolta merged the two legal departments of its European headquarters and its German sales organisation. The resulting department, under the leadership of manager of legal affairs Kai Mielke has since provided its legal advice as a shared service unit to both companies, elevating the quality of the team’s services to a higher level. Besides this, however, Mielke states that ‘the success and good reputation of Konica Minolta´s legal team is based essentially on three factors: the standardisation of in-house contract preparation processes, the reduction of processing times in the handling of inquiries and the observance of a communication style that furthers the legal understanding of non-legal colleagues’. The Konica Minolta legal team has also managed to overcome the prejudices that legal teams often face by other business units, and is now highly regarded by colleagues for its ‘cooperation and pragmatic support’. Owing to a strong, highly positive team culture the team enjoys excellent staff retention, which has allowed it, in Mielke’s opinion, to ‘identify the ever-recurring questions and challenges of other business fields as well and reflect them in its growing template database’. As part of this, ‘great value is attached to represent Konica Minolta’s corporate values in the contractual standards: being open and honest, customer-centric, innovative, passionate, inclusive and collaborative and accountable’. Finally, Mielke speaks on the team taking on further responsibilities for educating the wider company on legal matters and thus improving the legal capabilities of Konica Minolta across the board: ‘To round off the total package, Konica Minolta’s legal team is ambitioned to lift non-legal colleagues reservations towards legal matters. This begins with plain-language explanations in response to legal inquiries and is continued with how-to-tutorials in the company’s intranet and training events regarding recurring and current topics of a general interest. The team always has its fingers on the pulse of the business and reacts to actual demands. Demands, which will increase in a time of corporate change, for which Konica Minolta’s legal team is well prepared and equipped’.


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OPEN XCHANGE GROUP

Constructed from scratch over the past two years, general counsel Maxim Letski reports that the Open Xchange legal department is now a ‘highly specialised and dynamic legal team covering all major legal issues of the Group in-house’. Internally, it has brought about major positive changes to the team and the wider company: ‘The Open-Xchange legal team managed to implement GDPR-related changes and requirements to the business, established Open Source compliance and the implementation of a licence policy for the development of Open-Xchange’s software products, using legal technology applications to accomplish both these goals’. Externally, the team has managed a number of high-value projects of strategic importance to the company. ‘The team has worked on several multi-million outsourcing deals and licences agreements, including complex statements of work for software implementation and migration projects with different corporate customers in various jurisdictions’, Letski says. ‘It managed a cross-border IP and competition law litigation mainly taking place in the US and in Italy. The litigation involved two of Open-Xchange’s subsidiaries and lasted for over two years’. ‘Furthermore’, he says, ‘the team has supported the Group with a cross-border IP transfer from one of its subsidiaries, which has been acquired in 2015, into the holding company. Another important and outstanding accomplishment was to define and design a Group-wide corporate governance and compliance structure which has been accepted by the Group’s supervisory board and has been moved into the process of operational implementation. The implementation is now coordinated by the team in close collaboration with Open-Xchange’s board of executives and the extended management team. Apart from himself, Letski mentions Juliane Rychlik, Jorge Kärcher and Alexandar Stajic as having made exceptional contributions to the team’s success. Rychlik was mentioned for her ‘very efficient and productive management of GDPR implementation’, Kärcher for his ‘outstanding technical understanding’ and Stajic for his ‘tireless support of the legal team and management in handling complex issues’.

SOFTWARE AG

An extremely well-respected, competent and closely-knit team with a strong internal culture and excellent leadership, Software AG’s legal team has been at the centre of some prominent successful moves by the company in recent years. Its setting up of joint project Adamos with Zeiss, DMG Mori, Dürr and AMS – optics manufacturer, paint shop, tool manufacturer and PCB assembly machine company respectively – was completed with unparalleled speed and efficiency. This joint venture, founded on the internet of things and industry 4.0 principles, is a digital platform which allows a unified machinery and plant engineering hub, providing Software AG a further foothold in this lucrative market. Senior vice president global legal and general counsel Benno Quade is respected for his individual achievements within the team, and has been integral to many of these.


ZEOTAP

Zeotap provides high-quality data at scale from exclusive sources such as telecom operators, and makes it available to the digital advertising ecosystem. Founded in Berlin in September 2014, it today has offices in New York, London, Madrid, Milan, Paris, Bengaluru and Mumbai and counts all major media agencies and many global brands as its clients. For the last two years, its three-member in-house legal team, comprised by senior legal manager Barbara Radón, GDPR project manager Sabrina Faschko and associate legal manager Iole Neviani, has made the company a pioneer in GDPR compliance while creating competitive advantages through stringent certifications and patents. In 2016, Zeotap became one of the first data companies in the world to go through a GDPR assessment and to obtain a GDPR-ready certification then - which got re-certified in April 2018. Zeotap’s bulletproof positioning has also been strengthened thanks to the execution of stringent organizational and technical measures, which resulted in the ISO 27001 enterprise-grade security re-certification and CSA Star (silver cloud security) certification in April 2018. Finally, in July 2018 the technology behind Zeotap’s success, zeoCore, received its first patent in the US reflecting a GDPR-compliant anonymisation process of obtaining deterministic user data from different data partners and conducting a one-to-one AdID mapping. As of today, two additional patents in Canada and Europe are pending which upon approval will make zeoCore a recognized and protected solution in the major advertising markets in the world.

UNITED INTERNET

United Internet operates a number of well-known internet services brands, including email services GMX and Mail.com and web hosting company 1&1. In May 2017 United Internet and German telecommunication service provider Drillisch entered into an agreement to merge the former’s mobile and fixed network business, which is bundled in 1&1 Telecommunication. The legal team assisted in helping secure this merger, navigating the process under the business combination agreement, which enabled United Internet’s 1&1 Telecommunication unit to be acquired by Drillisch under the umbrella of United Internet. 1&1 Telecommunication is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Drillisch; in return, United Internet increased its stake in Drillisch to 73.1%. In August 2018, United Internet also completed the acquisition of Austrian web-hosting company World4You via 1&1 Internet, providing a further notable success for the legal team’s already impressive record.

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MATERIALS AND MINING

BASF

Led by group general counsel Wolfgang Haas, who is directly supported in the department by senior vice presidents Matt Lepore and Stefan John, globally BASF’s in-house legal team consists of over 200 individuals with over 50 based in Germany. Haas is extremely pleased with the team’s current state, stating that it is ‘a truly global team with a shared common culture and professional approach that has allowed international success and innovation’. He mentions a number of the most important of these: ‘Firstly, we have created the company’s first ever global panel of law firms to help us with global work. Secondly, we are launching a global contract lifecycle management system that will redefine how we contract at BASF across the globe. Thirdly, recognising the value of diversity and inclusion, we are building an internal structure to foster this and drive greater diversity throughout our legal department. Fourthly, we have reorganised our legal department around the principle that the best lawyers know their businesses, and towards this have created division general counsels for each of our 12 global operating divisions and provided teams and resources to deliver legal services to businesses quickly. Finally, last year we developed a global risk management system so we can look across our business for compliance risks’. On the transaction front, Haas reports similarly impressive achievements. ‘This year’, he says, ‘I am particularly proud that we closed on our single largest transaction ever – purchasing major parts of Bayer’s seed businesses for several billion euros. This was an incredibly complicated transaction handled by legal colleagues around the globe’. Unsurprisingly, Haas sums up the BASF legal team incredibly positively: ‘We have a terrific legal team at BASF. Our colleagues are hard-working and innovative, creative and highly experienced. And while each region like Germany has unique qualities and approaches, I believe our global approach alone is innovative’.

EVONIK INDUSTRIES

Renowned for being the largest specialty chemicals company globally, Evonik Industries’ legal team has to deal with correspondingly large projects as a matter of course. Perhaps the most prominent of these was completed in January 2017, which saw the company acquire the specialty additives business of US company Air Products. This deal, which was one of the largest successfully completed that year and valued at $3.8bn was a highly complex arrangement which included it being partially funded by bonds. Getting this intricate deal over the line, which resulted in an increase in the market value of the company, is a testament to the skill and capability of the Evonik legal department.


MATERIALS AND MINING

HEIDELBERGCEMENT

HeidelbergCement is one of the world’s largest building materials companies; with the takeover of Italian cement producer Italcementi, HeidelbergCement became the number one in aggregates production, number two in cement and number three in ready-mixed concrete. In 2016, the legal department guided HeidelbergCement through completing this deal, specifically an acquisition of a 45% shareholding in Italcementi, which has done a great deal to consolidate its extremely strong position in the cement market. Recently the legal division was tasked with the task of renewing the partnership between HeidelbergCement and Birdlife, a partnership that was established in 2012, based on shared values of promoting biodiversity while using natural sources sustainably. Roland Sterr is the general counsel and director group legal for HeidelbergCement, providing oversight over the legal team’s operations in international remits and heavily involved in the planned construction on a number of cement plants.

LANXESS

LANXESS made headlines in the business press around Europe in 2017 when it completed the largest acquisition in its history by taking over US-based Chemtura in a deal valued at $2.1bn which saw it take over 20 sites across eleven countries. This highly complex deal vindicated the LANXESS legal team strategy of maintaining an extremely potent transactional capability within the team, which allowed this deal to progress without any notable issues. Key personalities within the team responsible for its excellent performance on this and other cases include group general counsel Jochen Schroer and head of general law Stephanie Cossmann.

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THE LINDE GROUP

Led by head of group legal and compliance Dr Christoph Hammerl and approximately 120-strong, the in-house legal function at The Linde Group is on one of the most impressive legal teams in Europe. Daniel Schmachtenberg, head of legal region Europe South and EMEA gave some insight into some of the major internal innovations and projects the team has led successfully over the past two years. On the internal side, he mentioned ‘the successful implementation of legal tech solution iManage to facilitate teamwork and the continuous adaptation of Linde’s group legal and compliance to client structure in transformation due to pre-merger efficiency programs, divestments and re-organisations’. As for project work, he mentioned three main areas that have generated a large volume of work for the team. ‘Firstly’, he lists, ‘legal preparatory work – due diligences, re-organisations, carve outs – regarding possible global mega-merger with competitor Praxair, subject to strict competition law requirements. Secondly, continuous client support in sometimes difficult circumstances regarding everything from day-to-day legal business, liability topics to mega “build-own-operate” projects worth Linde investments of two to three digit million euro figures. Thirdly, adaption to new data protection regulation has been extremely important to the company and required a large amount of work from the team’. Hammerl’s and Schmachtenberg’s performance has been complemented by the hard work of many other team members, including by way of example, Dr Johannes Dittrich’s lead on the competition law workstream for the proposed merger.

VDM METALS HOLDING

An extremely lively past 24 months has borne significant transactional fruit for the VDM Metals Holding legal team, with general counsel Matthias Möhle listing the most impressive of these. ‘As well as a €150m revolving credit facility, a €100m factoring agreement and our assistance in the sale of VDM Metals Group to Aperam’, still subject to merger control approval, he explains, ‘we introduced new compliance and risk management systems and engaged in successful defences of the Group in a number of high profile legal proceedings in Germany, the EU and the US.’ Commenting on the increased legislation encountered by the team when undertaking its work, Möhle mentions his diversified team extremely favourably – particularly Silvije Cvjetko who has been ‘very reliable and hands-on in elevating the service level’ of the team. Internally, the team has also successfully overseen a comprehensive restructuring of core functions, as Möhle details: ‘Following the spin-off, core functions were newly structured. Under PE-ownership, the team created PE-appropriate lean structures for legal, compliance, risk management and insurance. We introduced a new risk management logic, started a worldwide legal billing tool and are currently introducing a new tool for compliance matters’.

SPORTS AND MEDIA

AXEL SPRINGER

Axel Springer has become Europe’s leading digital publisher, with numerous multimedia known brands such as Bild, Die Welt and Fakt. It currently employees over 15,000 people in more than 40 countries earning over €3bn in total annual revenues. Since 2012, the legal team has been led by Dr Konrad Wartenberg, who became the multinational media group’s general counsel, a newly created position at the time. Under his management, the team has grown and established itself as a core facilitator of business operations, responsible for the central areas regarding corporate law matters. The team is split into two functions, one that deals with business operations and one that is responsible for central areas as well as corporate law. Behind a number of landmark deals for Axel Springer, the legal team assisted in the purchase of website Business Insider in 2015 for around $440m and in the same year, the purchase of the remaining 30% stake in Axel Springer Digital Classifieds from General Atlantic.

PROSIEBENSAT.1 MEDIA

Chief legal officer Alexander von Voss leads ProSiebenSat.1 Media’s highly-lauded legal team, which has been widely praised in recent years as one of the top performers within Germany. It has played a key role in the company’s increased synergy of its digital and TV business, in order to compete with new delivery platforms based on digital and on-demand options; ProSiebenSat.1 Media’s own on-demand portal Maxdome is a key part of this strategy. Alongside this, a corporate strategy based around expansion through acquisitions has been enabled by the company’s legal team, which has expanded its M&A department in response to these needs. The team is also highly entrepreneurial in spirit and in sync with the commercial goals of the business, regularly feeding back to the business elements of ProSiebenSat.1 Media to ensure legal and company goals are exactly aligned.

STRÖER

An extremely active period in terms of acquisitions has marked the Ströer legal team’s work in recent years, and the department has built up an impressive portfolio in this regard that has seen it earn plaudits from multiple sources among the industry press. In 2015, they helped the company acquire T-online and InteractiveMedia CCSP from Deutsche Telekom. In 2016, shortly after overseeing the company’s listing on the MDAX, the Ströer legal team was integral to the acquisition of market research company Statista. In 2017, it added marketing company Avedo to its list of acquisitions, with this company’s specialist expertise adding to Avedo’s already potent marketing package.

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TELECOMMUNICATION SERVICES

DEUTSCHE TELEKOM

Led by general counsel Dr Claudia Junker who has led the company’s legal function since 2010, Deutsche Telekom can count on a highly skilled, motivated and knowledgeable legal team to safeguard its operations. An active year for the company’s legal team has seen it win a prominent case in Düsseldorf relating to third party use of its cable ducts which saw the court rule that Telekom’s rental charges for this were correct. Alongside this, in February 2018 the team is credited for contributing to the setup of a joint venture with Zeiss to develop smart glasses; the resulting company, called Tooz, has already developed a number of products with a view to launching as and when needed.

HUAWEI

Leading global provider of information and communications technology infrastructure and smart devices Huawei provides integrated solutions across four key domains – telecom networks, smart devices, IT and cloud services. The West European legal department is coordinating around 30 in-house lawyers, including several country teams within a multi-jurisdictional remit. Yongsheng Wang is the West European Legal Director and is responsible for expanding and developing Huawei’s legal team in response to the increasing scope of its responsibilities, with Jan Bredehöft, Associate Legal Director, and Lu You, Senior West European Legal Expert, as further senior members of the department. Not only do the legal team execute effective team play but they have also displayed strong understanding of the ICT and Telecommunications industry and a good grasp of the company strategy, enabling them to deal with complex legal matters that the business encounters. The West European legal department is putting a strong emphasis to be a strong partner to the business and to provide strategic legal advice in the context of an increasingly dynamic and cross-cultural environment.

TELECOMMUNICATION SERVICES

TELEFÓNICA GLOBAL SERVICES

Internally, the Telefónica Global Services legal team’s work has been ‘all about digitalisation’ recently, according to general counsel in Germany Florian Engel: ‘We are streamlining contractual works and processes by implementation of the company’s own “legal tech” such as a tool for proposing appropriate contract clauses in a negotiation software already, which might lead to a final, in the best way executed, contract version without the need of a legal counsel’s involvement at all’. When asked about the most important projects worked upon over the past two years, Engel opts for the huge expansion of Telefónica Global Services’ responsibilities out from Telefónica Group. ‘We were originally set up as a group internal service centre for Telefónica Group companies only’, he explains. ’Now, the services of this subgroup are to be opened up to group-external telecommunication companies worldwide. For around two years our main project has been setting a completely new legal framework for our turnaround from a purely internal group service centre to a recognised and state-of-the-art branch service provider for other telecommunication companies worldwide’. With major regulatory changes affecting the teams work to an increasingly large extent, the team relies on a number of highly qualified individuals to safeguard its business fortunes, with Engel mentioning his colleague Thomas Marx as having made a particularly strong contribution on the back of his support of the digitalisation of contract handling. Engel is convinced of the efficacy of digitalisation to a modern general counsel. ‘As a general trend for in-house legal counselling, I can state that the life-cycles of commercial arrangements are becoming significantly shorter. We need to find new ways, processes and infrastructure to still give substantial legal advice on the one hand and to meet the shorter deadlines on the other, which means digitalisation and even automisation in core parts of the legal department’, he concludes.

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TRANSPORT AND INFRASTRUCTURE

DEUTSCHE BAHN

Representing Deutsche Bahn (DB), one of the leading global mobility and logistic companies, is a legal department with 150 lawyers working from Germany and 100 lawyers stationed in foreign offices around the world. The team is known for its top-tier expertise in all areas of law relevant to DB’s interests. Under the leadership of group general counsel Dr Alexander Gommlich and his executive team, DB’s lawyers have handled a spate of complex regulatory cases over recent years and played a central role in key international M&A projects. Recent developments include Gommlich’s creation in 2017 of an innovative competence centre for digitalisation law topics, which provides comprehensive legal advice in support of challenging projects for the adoption of ground breaking technology for automated trains, autonomous buses, new mobility solutions for “smart city living”, IoT and artificial intelligence applications. By adopting an agile team approach – guided by the principles of non-hierarchy, self-organisation and transparency the competence center ensures hands-on legal advice and is an integral part of DB’s digitalisation and new technology projects. Furthermore, with the strong legal drive of DB’s lawyers, the company has become a pioneer and European leader in the private enforcement of antitrust claims. Since 2013, the competition litigation and antitrust economics legal team has successfully recovered approximately €500m in claims for damages suffered through violations of antitrust law in more than 40 settlements. Prominent cases include the rail track, escalator and elevator and coffee cartels in Germany as well as the carbon brushes cartel in the UK. Further claims for damages totalling over €1bn are being actively pursued in six different jurisdictions, further evidencing the scope and capability of DB’s in-house legal professionals.

DEUTSCHE POST

Deutsche Post is the world’s largest postal service and international service company, it has 510,000 employees and delivers 61 million letters each day in Germany. Due in part to its ownership of worldwide logistics company DHL, it is listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and is also named in the Euro Stoxx 50 stock market index. The Germany-based legal department leads the legal and compliance strategies of the company, ensuring Deutsche Post can complete its strategic business objectives and facilitating its position as one of the largest European companies with an expansive global presence. The legal function has been at the forefront of recent developments in growing e-commerce and technology opportunities, namely the deployment of self-driving delivery trucks this year, something which they have proposed to Amazon to potentially implement in order to grow its transportation network.


DEGES

With a total project volume of complex infrastructure projects under management of approximately €24.5bn, state-owned firm DEGES goes about its business in an interdisciplinary manner, meaning that – as team lawyer Peter Welter explains – the company’s legal team ‘is therefore not reduced to the classic consulting role, but is an integral part of the value creation chain’. Overall head of the approximately 60-strong legal team is Martin Regnath, authorised signatory and division head of legal, real estate and procurement, who oversees this highly capable and versatile legal function. Welter, who has been at the heart of much of the team’s success in recent years, gave some further insight into some of its most notable achievements over the past 24 months: ‘Recently, we have developed and provided new legal (and other) instruments: partner project processing with various mediation models, legal project assistance, fully electronic procurement and contract workflow and a new knowledge management system’. As well as this, he mentions that the company has ‘acquired new projects worth several billion euros from across Germany’, and has ‘recently successfully completed the procurement of a planning permission for 42 kilometre-long highway sections with a construction volume of approximately €776m’. Among a number of highly qualified in-house counsel, Ernst-Albrecht Notzke and Petra Kocken were mentioned alongside Regnath and Welter as having made particularly strong contributions to the team, the former for having ‘established and put into practice the legal project management regarding complex, technically challenging and lucrative projects’, and the latter ‘for the creation of uniform standards as well as the information and ongoing training of employees on legal topics’.


HAPAG-LLOYD

A highly-regarded legal function operating in the demanding maritime sector (principally container shipping, but the company is also involved in cruises via a subsidiary), the Hapag-Lloyd in-house legal team has been particularly noteworthy over the past two years for its tax-focused legal advice, leading to plaudits from the industry press. Thomas Mansfeld is general counsel and chief compliance officer, and has been integral to the team’s success over recent years. Externally, perhaps the most notable transaction the company – and legal team – have been involved in was its merger with competitor United Arab Shipping Company, fully completed in late 2017.

LUFTHANSA CARGO

Excellent regulatory compliance in the necessarily extremely tightly-controlled air freight market is a must, especially for a high-profile company such as Lufthansa Cargo. It is thus at the forefront of such matters, as evidenced by its announcement in September 2018 that it was the first airline to successfully transport dangerous goods via an electronic dangerous goods (eDGD) declaration. The company itself, led from the front by its in-house legal department, has made a major contribution to the establishment of eDGD standards that will allow paperless dangerous goods shipment to assume increasing importance in coming months.

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LUFTHANSA GROUP

One of the most prestigious airlines globally, Lufthansa is not only one of the largest airline groups but also well-renowned as one of the best; it was ranked as the 7th best airline in the world by renowned airline consultancy Skytrax in 2018. Its legal function has to keep up with a dizzying volume of work which is part and parcel of operating in the fast-paced, finely-tuned and highly competitive commercial airline industry. As well as new aircraft orders, route network management, the establishment of new connections and logistics and supply chain management, corporate social responsibility and brand image are of paramount importance for such a customer-focused company, and M&A work is a frequent concern as new airlines join the Group. As such, the Lufthansa Group legal team is among the most capable legal functions in Europe and combines a vast amount of both generalist and specialist knowledge. Dr Bettina Volkens, a lawyer by trade serves as member of the executive board and chief officer corporate human resources and legal affairs, highlighting that the legal department is a major figure within the executive management of the Group.

UBER

The rapid expansion and success of Uber has seen it become an integral part of the transport landscape of many European cities, but historically Germany has been a market where the company has faced difficulties in finding the right approach when facing incumbent market players due to a rather conservative regulatory environment covering the mobility sector as a whole. Recently, however, the company has been gearing up for a massive expansion in the country having pioneered a workable model to promote this. The Western and Southern Europe legal team, based between Paris, Berlin, Madrid and Amsterdam and led by legal director Riccardo Falconi (also in charge of EU legal affairs and EMEA antitrust), has been absolutely instrumental in achieving this and is subsequently highly lauded by the company. Falconi explains that this breakthrough was notably achieved by ‘moving into bespoke local models that were fitting with the dynamics of each relevant city while preserving the unique in-app experience as available to users globally. In other words, irrespective of the operational set-up the user experience is exactly the same as in London, Paris or elsewhere – it’s just that behind the scenes the process is different.’ This in turn allowed the company to come to good terms with what can otherwise appear as antiquated regulations which can for example require vehicles to be booked via SMS or telephone only – going against Uber’s usual mobile application-based approach. ‘In 2016-17 we began moving towards innovative “out-of-the-box” models in close cooperation with key local partners with whom we were then able to engage in constructive discussions with local regulators, such as for example in Berlin where we have eventually been provided with full clearance after months of dialogue. Before undertaking this new approach tailored to local needs, we were able to only do a couple of hundred trips per week, and can now cross 100,000 per week in a constant environment’. Uber’s Germany-based legal team is in a process of major expansion and has been further strengthened by the recent relocation of legal and regulatory counsel Johannes Hildebrand from the Amsterdam office as part of overall greater investment in the country as it looks set to expand into other German cities beyond Berlin and Munich. As such, Uber legal has a very real contribution to make to the building of a more forward-thinking German transport sector with plenty of other innovations and key partnerships being undertaken and on the horizon – including its championing of new forms of mobilities, regulatory evolution and an increasing proportion of vehicles being environmentally friendly. ‘We have been among the first to really push for this green mobility in Germany’, Falconi explains, ‘and allow our users to consciously order a green vehicle, usually at the same cost. This has proved to be very successful, with a sizeable amount of trips being now done in Munich with fully electric vehicles. And this trend towards eco-friendly transports can only get better with other cities to follow as well as with Berlin being announced as the very first European city where Uber will be launching electric bikes!’.


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SECTOR

The 2019 Annual Conference will be held in Seoul, South Korea, a

thriving metropolis where modern skyscrapers, high-tech subways

and pop culture meet Buddhist temples, palaces and street markets.

South Korea is a world leader in electronics, consumer goods,

shipbuilding, auto vehicle manufacturing and steel making, with

some of the largest Korean companies such as Samsung, LG and

Hyundai now household names. South Korea is the 4th largest

economy in Asia and the 12th largest in the world and is one of

the fastest growing developed economies.

Seoul is developing as a design, fashion and technology centre,

and breaking out as a key business hub. This technology forward,

but deeply traditional city, will be an ideal location for the largest

and most prestigious event for international lawyers, providing an

abundance of business and networking opportunities.

WHAT WILL IBA 2019 OFFER YOU?• Gain up-to-date knowledge of the key developments in your

area of law which you can put into practice straight away

• Access to the world’s best networking and business development

event for lawyers and law firms – attracting over 6,000

individuals representing over 2,700 law firms, corporations,

governments and regulators from over 130 jurisdictions

• Build invaluable international connections with leading

practitioners worldwide, enabling you to win more work

and referrals

• Increase your personal and law firm’s profile in the international

legal world

• Hear from leading international figures, including officials from

the government and multilateral institutions, general counsel

and experts from across all practice areas and continents

• Acquire a greater knowledge of the role of law in society

through rule of law and human rights

• Be part of the debate on the future of the law

OFFICIAL CORPORATE SUPPORTER

T O R E G I S T E R Y O U R I N T E R E S T:

Visit: www.ibanet.org/Form/

IBASeoul2019.aspx

Email: [email protected]

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exhibiting and sponsorship opportunities

for the IBA Annual Conference in Seoul,

email [email protected]

Aareal Bank- transaction legal team 22Acatus 21adidas 7Allianz 21Amprion 17Audi 7Aurelius 23Axel Springer 51B. Braun Group 34BASF 48BMW 8Banco Santander 24Bayer 34Beiersdorf 7Boehringer Ingelheim 35Bombardier Transportation 38Bosch 38Braskem 18Calypso Technology 43Commerzbank 25Continental 8DEGES 55Daimler 9Deutsche Bahn 54Deutsche Bank 25Deutsche Börse 25Deutsche Post 54Deutsche Telekom 52Edeka 8E.ON 17EY 6Evonik Industries 48Fresenius Medical Care 35FUJIFILM Europe 10GEA Group 39Generali Deutschland 26HSE24 10Hapag-Lloyd 56HARIBO Group 33HeidelbergCement 49Henkel 10Hensoldt Group 39Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) 44Huawei 52Hugo Boss 11HypoVereinsbank (UniCredit Bank) 26Hyundai Motor Europe 11IKB Deutsche Industriebank 27ING-DiBa 27ING Germany Wholesale Banking Legal 28

innogy 19Inter Hannover 26JLL Germany 28KfW 29Klarna Group 30Konica Minolta 45KRÜGER Group 32Landesbank Baden-Württemberg (LBBW) 30LANXESS 49Lemon Group Services 6Lufthansa Cargo 56Lufthansa Group 56Lufthansa Technik 39MAHLE 12MANN + HUMMEL Group 41MediaMarktSaturn Retail Group 12Merck Group Legal Services 35Merck Legal Healthcare 36METRO 13Native Instruments 13Open Xchange Group 46Otto Group 14PGIM Real Estate 40ProSiebenSat.1 Media 51Puma 14REWE Group 37RWE 17Sandoz 36SAP 43Schwarz Gruppe 15Siemens 41Software AG 46Ströer 51Sybac Solar Group 20Tchibo 15Telefónica Global Services 53The Linde Group 50Thüga 18thyssenkrupp 42TUI Group 37UBS Asset Management 31Uber 57Unilever 15Uniper 19United Internet 47VDM Metals Holding 50Volkswagen 16WERTGARANTIE Group 31Zalando 16Zeotap 47

INDEX

GERMANY TEAMS 2018 | GC POWERLIST


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