About

Lars Sjöbring is the general counsel of Stockholm-headquartered Autoliv, a leading automotive safety technology company with operations globally. Sjöbring expertly manages a global legal team, which consists of 20 members, with six lawyers reporting to him directly, although he is ultimately responsible for the entire legal team whose staff are based across the world. Sjöbring helped guide Autoliv in the aftermath of the financial crisis and through a regulatory bonanza that ocurred in the financial and automotive industries. At Autoliv, he worked on an antitrust case involving the company, and had to stand before a federal judge in Detroit, Michigan and pled guilty on behalf of the company as part of a settlement. He says, ‘standing in front of a judge raising your hand and pleading guilty, even on behalf of a client, was a very emotional experience’. During his time as general counsel at Autoliv he has implemented changes to merge the department further into the business model of the company, and taken the department from its regional role to being part of the business segment of the company. He identifies that the scandals reported in the automotive industry in recent years have triggered great political interest and regulatory changes which have impacted his work. Autoliv have in turn tried to work closely with regulators and customers to ensure a high level of trust is maintained. He says, ‘where we find that we have an issue, we don’t hide and we don’t play games. Instead, we strive for openness and transparency with customers and regulators – and even if this has long been part of Autoliv’s way of working, we do so even more now’. He started his in-house career working on M&A for Nokia, leaving to join Autoliv for the first time in 2007 as general counsel, remaining with the company until the end of 2013 when he left for Transocean based in Switzerland, but re-joined in 2015. Whilst at Transocean, Sjöbring managed the settlements with BP, the Gulf States and the Plaintiff’s Steering Committee in the Deepwater Horizon litigations. He describes this period of his career as a ‘privilege’, as this was ‘a complex process with very big stakes and risks, and in the end we achieved a great outcome for the company’. After the conclusion of our research period, Sjöbring became the executive vice president of legal affairs, general counsel and secretary of Veoneer based in the US. This came in the aftermath of Autoliv’s successful completion of the spin-off of the electronics segment of its business in the summer of 2018.