About

Before joining leading energy company Schneider Electric, Yvonne Ivarsson held a number of position at various institutions, including the Faculty of Law at Lund University, where she was a lecturer between 1996 and 2000. After this she joined law firm Mannheimer Swartling spending almost 11 years there as a senior associate, until January 2011. Ivarsson started her time at Schneider Electric as chief legal counsel, responsible for all legal support in the Nordic and Baltic region. Building the legal team from scratch, the first and main change she implemented was to redirect any requests for legal advice to the in-house legal department instead of to the external law firms. In bringing outside counsel use under control, most legal work is now performed in-house by Ivarsson’s team of two. The team supports the local businesses on all aspects of their operations, covering a wide variety of legal work on a daily basis. Building a legal team that is proavtively involved on most matters is one of Ivarsson’s biggest career highlights. ‘Today the legal department is a natural and important part in the decision and approval processes. We have supported the local business with a large amount of multi-million euro contracts for complex projects as well as high value, strategic global framework agreements’, she says. Having to support functions across seven jurisdictions and with limited resources, Ivarsson had the foresight to recognise the need for having supporting structures. She therefore guides her team in delivering training for the business, standardising processes by creating templates for legal documents, and defining procedures when seeking corporate approvals. She also established “Compliance Councils” in each of the jurisdictions with local management members, to ensure compliance matters are closely covered and to facilitate roll-outs of new internal corporate compliance policies.