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

DNV is a worldwide company which recently celebrated its 160 anniversary of being a trusted voice among a diversity of industry sectors. The reason relies on our principles driving our purpose of safeguarding life, property, and the environment and is inspired by our vision to be a trusted voice to tackle global transformations. Certainly, this integrity has been challenged by diverse attempts at corruption, coming from the highest levels of power, but we in DNV are proud to be better than that. As a legal counsel my daily job focuses on securing this integrity from negotiating a contract which allows us to perform a service without any bias, all the way to securing that the results will be respected, disregarding any political implication or attempt to influence on them, which might imply, civil, commercial, and criminal litigation or administrative processes. For this, it is essential to be updated on legal requirements and reforms and develop the proper internal policies to ensure that the company is following these requirements including obviously, the corporate governance.

Could you share an example of a time when you came up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works and did not come at a large expense?  

DNV has presence in over 100 countries around the world, which implies a multicultural working experience. As such, having English as a business language is basic. Nevertheless, if you aim for a deeper understanding, particularly of legal terms, it is important to tackle some walls built by people who are not experts on the matter and with a different mothertongue. As such, I have discovered that this engagement could be created by approaching the business areas to discover which are the situations they face where they hesitate on legal implications and risks, establishing a program of legal trainings in local language to specifically address this situation. This has been a complete success among the Spanish speaking countries, where the videos and presentations are available for everyone, and people feel confident to participate and share their experiences and questions. This has reduced the time invested in internal counseling, but more importantly, reduced the legal risks taken by commercial areas on their day-to-day operation, being also a teambuilding activity with no cost implied.

What is a cause, business related or otherwise, that you care about, and why?

Integrity is a principle that I really care about and that I value the most in a company. To know that we, as lawyers, can operate in a company with strong principles and without any doubt of corruption and even more, is invaluable and has created a full commitment on my side to become the best possible lawyer for the company. In the end, all this will result in protecting life, property and environment, making a change for the better.