Team size: 10

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crises, and how does your legal strategy align with the broader business strategy to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

We manage legal topics with a healthy mix of foresight and agility. While foresight, analysis, and preparation are paramount to tackle foreseeable challenges looming at the horizon, no one can foresee every crisis, what a crisis will exactly look like, and when exactly it will hit. Further, there is a seemingly increasing number of black swan events, i.e. unpredictable events that are beyond what is normally expected of a situation and that have potentially severe consequences. Instant crisis and black swans you can only tackle with an agile mindset, proper ad hoc crisis management, and exceptional situational leadership skills.

Our strategy to ensure the company’s resilience is to be permanently on the lookout for upcoming business and compliance challenges, analyse those, think out of the box, come up with creative solutions, ideally before the risk materialises, in any case always stay calm, and provide our leadership with proper risk assessment and different options for reaction. We train our lawyers to always be on alert, keep an eagle eye on recent developments in their field, and ring an alarm bell whenever they see anything.

What are the main cases or transactions that you have been involved in recently?

I navigated two major company restructurings, managed an international compliance crisis with a multinational vendor that threatened our reputation and led to a cross-border lawsuit, adapted to unexpected legislative changes that required adjustments to our business model across multiple countries, and took over the leadership of our People & Culture department, stabilising and rebuilding it while simultaneously overseeing both Legal and People operations.

What do you see as the major legal challenges for businesses in Germany over the next five years, and how are you preparing to address them?

From my point of view, the major legal challenges for businesses in Germany over the next five years will be about national and international labour laws dealing with cross-border remote work, Artificial Intelligence (what else) and ESG.

On labour laws, changes in national labour laws and regulations, particularly concerning digital remote work across borders, and the rights of employees working remotely from home for companies in other countries, will pose significant challenges. While jurisdictions are national by nature, digital remote work in times of skilled labour shortage is rather international by nature, it’s happening across national borders.

The rise of remote working hence necessitates the modernisation of national regulations which are dating back a hundred years, we need to be open to creating new types of digital cross-border employment relationships, and we need to come up with all the respective policies, taking two or more – potentially conflicting – national jurisdictions into consideration.

In our company, a globally operating HR tech startup, we – including the Legal department – are shaping this future of work. Via our global platform, companies in Europe and all over the world can employ the best talents regardless of location. Our customers can onboard new remote employees within minutes and manage their globally distributed workforce with our global employment and payroll platform.

The ongoing integration of AI in all sorts of business processes obviously poses various legal challenges, including ethical questions, liability issues, and regulatory challenges. Ensuring that AI systems are safe to use for people in business, non-discriminatory, and secure in terms of IT and data security is quintessential. We are addressing these challenges by testing AI technology in our product, developing AI guidelines, providing trainings to our employees as to how to use AI properly, and setting up an internal task force in our company to understand the implications and challenges of this new technology. It’s fun and quite exciting!

Lastly, ESG considerations are now becoming central to business operations. Companies need to navigate a growing body of regulations promoting sustainability, social responsibility, and good governance. We have started to incorporate ESG criteria into our compliance frameworks, and plan to set up a dedicated team in 2025 to work more intensely on the topic, and to monitor regulatory changes in different jurisdictions of our global business more closely. It’s quite a challenge for an SME like us; we are not a big corporate that can afford to hire an entire department to work on these things.