About

In place as general counsel and authorised representative of Telefónica Global Services from 2014, during which time he enjoyed an enviable record of success at the telecoms giant, Florian Engel started a new career chapter in June 2019 by moving to Reverse Logistics Group as group general counsel and chief compliance officer. The company is a leading specialist for international returns management solutions and related environmental compliance tasks, and provides, via 20 regional offices on three continents, return-to-value services in more than 50 countries. Engel clearly has an extremely diverse and intellectually stimulating set of responsibilities. Engel looks back fondly on his time with Telefónica: ‘Having been legal-content-wise responsible for the Telefónica’s global procurement and, in particular, Telefónica’s worldwide buying and selling of roaming capacities in the mobile networks, brought me in contact with lawyers, legal practices and commercial cultures in each jurisdiction of the world. So, I learned to assert the company’s legal positions literally around the globe. This opened me a real international perspective on legal negotiations and contractual feasibility of the intended undertakings’. Engel looks forward to seeing where the in-house legal market goes next, and is ready to adapt and innovate in his new role. ‘As a general trend for in-house legal counselling, I would state that the life-cycles of commercial arrangements are becoming significantly shorter’, he explains. ‘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 being more open for legal tech which will lead to digitalisation and even automisation in former core parts of the legal department’s services’.