What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

Most recently, our legal department has been involved in the acquisition of an entity in Canada, in 2020, and of another, in the US, in 2021.

How do you feel the pandemic has changed the world of work for in-house counsel and the function of the general counsel?

It basically proved that we could communicate and complete work reliably and efficiently, via technological tools, coming to the 21st century much faster than it would have happened in the usually flow of things. Legal tech seems to develop much faster, as the features of a CLM tool are not only being a repository tool but include AI type features and allows making informed decisions much more accurately, by creating a single source of truth where you can slice and dice data to be fully informed. These tools also help with keeping team sizes rather on the smaller side and therefore again support profitability.

The downside of the coin is that we have less face-to-face interactions. For a leader, it is even more crucial to make sure that your team is heard and appreciated, since these afore mentioned tools can let you and your team live in parallel streams. This leads to detachment, loss of motivation. All this will decrease team efficiency and ultimately influence profitability.

How much influence do you, as a general counsel, have on the diversity and inclusions policies of your organisation?

Diversity is crucial in this company, since we have double digit number of nationalities from all over the world and support remote work, allowing everyone to adapt their work to their lives.

Also, ESG is becoming a priority for investors and, consequently, general counsels often face challenges when drafting such policies. However, these policies cannot just be drafted by a general counsel. It needs multi stakeholder involvement to answer the questions “where are we?” and “where do we want to be?”. The general counsel can lead and guide but cannot operate it alone. This would also defeat the purpose of diversity, as diversity is not only about gender or nationality, but also about background, multi stakeholder participating and involving all relevant departments.

As vice president in our company, I embrace diversity and inclusion, by being a role model and viewed as such. I am co-initiator of a diversity initiative called Leading Circle, addressing MBA students and alumni with the aim that future and current hiring managers understand and embrace diversity too.

Additionally, recently I became co-Initiator of an initiative called Women of Saas, standing for software as a service. In the tech area, women are still very underrepresented. With our initiative, we create visibility and develop a network of women supporting each other.