About

Head of legal Maike Weber explains the music technology company Native Instruments legal team’s transformation to entirely digital working practices as perhaps its most important innovation of recent years. ‘We already started an electronic documents archive eight years ago when I joined the company. After evaluating the possibilities of digital signature processes last summer, we meanwhile have all our contracts with externals signed digitally. Furthermore, this led to having NDAs signed via link by non-legal team colleagues to externals’, she explains. Outside-facing projects have been equally important for the team, providing a variety of transactions for it to work on, as Weber recalls: ‘Alongside managing due diligence and getting an investment for our company in a relatively short time frame, we have launched a new business model – an online marketplace for musicians accessible for third parties as suppliers of the audio content. We also negotiated the terms for contracts with high profile partners to create long-awaited follow up versions of well-appraised products, extended our business scope in China and France by founding entities there, took over two start-ups and also supervised the biggest parallel release of products in the over 20-year long history of our company’. This incredibly impressive list of achievements was not achieved by accident, and Weber also speaks to the unique characteristics of her team that fed into its success. ‘Each of us has his or her specialities’, she says, ‘but our colleagues from the other departments do not need to take this into account as we work as a team, and all of us contribute equally to the team’.