Legal team size: 10

Major legal advisers or external counsel: Willkie Farr & Gallagher, Baker Hostetler, Husch Blackwell, Becker Gurian

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

We have been involved in patent litigation before the International Trade Commission. This is an administrative action that is similar to a typical litigation procedure, but on a much faster timeline with guidelines that are “set in stone”. This required a huge lift for preparing technical and economic information to be included in the proceedings. We work with outside counsel that specialises in ITC litigation, and this has required significant partnership and cooperation between the subsidiary that holds the relevant patent, legal, finance and our executive management (including our global board of directors).

We have been active in international M&A, acquiring four companies and several product lines to fuel the company’s growth strategies. Since we are an international company, we have the additional step of working with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) for certain transactions.

As a small and relatively new legal department, we have focused on building processes, standard forms and easily digestible training so that the business can easily engage with a function that had not previously existed. One of our most significant achievements is a notable uptick in business partners approaching the legal team for insight and collaboration.

Which recent political, economic or regulatory changes have impacted your work the most in the past year?

Rapidly changing US and EU Export Control regulations have drawn significant attention to our compliance operations. Furthermore, we have been emphasising training, both within the legal/compliance teams, and for our operations and engineering teams. We have learned that both export regulations and the details of our technology are complicated, so a strong partnership between legal, compliance and our engineering teams is crucial.

Our team works very hard to ensure we are nimble and reactive when there are political or regulatory changes that impact our business. For example, we have built processes to ensure we are not running afoul of rules against working in Russia and Venezuela. Some of our products can be used in the semiconductor industry, so we have partnered across departments to ensure that we are fully updated about, and in compliance with, export controls, ITAR regulations and other regulatory restrictions as they pertain to China, for example.

How does your legal team collaborate with other departments within the company?

Since we are spread across the globe, the legal team travels to be in front of our business partners. We find that conducting training sessions and building interpersonal relationships rapidly increases the partnership with legal.

One of our mantras is “It is better to be interested than interesting”. We encourage the legal team to fuel our curiosity – by asking our colleagues many questions, we have gained valuable insights and reached conclusions that have served the business well.

We leverage several productivity tools, including Microsoft Teams and Sharepoint to collaborate with other areas of the business.