Team size: 15

Key team members: Anders Dybro, vice president, head of group legal and deputy general counsel

Major legal advisers: Gorrissen Federspiel

Can you give an idea of the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

We were involved in the acquisition and integration of gaming company SteelSeries into the GN Group. We also worked on the Ukraine crisis and ensuing closure of GN’s activities in Russia. Further, we were involved in the settlement and closure of several large patent cases, as well as the expansion of the Smart Hearing Alliance, a unique collaboration between Cochlear and ReSound, that makes it easy to provide a bimodal solution for hearing impaired. The partnership provides connectivity solutions that work with both GN hearing aids and cochlear implants. We also worked on managing contractual supply chain optimisation and implementation of ESG drivers

Do you have an example of a time when you have come up with an innovation that improved how your legal team functions, while avoiding any large expense?

Based on an increase in GN’s spend on Domain Name Services (“DNS services”) during Covid, actions were initiated by GN’s legal team to reduce costs in the short term. Through a structured tender process, prices and terms from other DNS providers were used as benchmarks to re-negotiate current fee structure. This exercise led to a reduction of basic fees and a total discount amounting to nearly 75%. Moreover, a good collaboration between legal and IT resulted in a clean-up of our DNS traffic to further reduce costs. The goal for 2023 is to continue to deliver on the new lower cost level through cooperation between legal, IT and external providers.

Looking forward, what technological advancements do you feel will impact the role of in-house legal teams in the future the most?

Technological advancements expected to impact our legal function include new “smart” contract management systems and increased use of AI, both for general commercial purposes and in the legal function. We are also in the process of increasing our information security knowledgebase and work in legal areas such as NIS 2 and AI.

How has the increasing consciousness of climate change and sustainability affected your company and the team’s priorities?

While sustainability is not new to GN, GN Group Legal decided to put ESG on their agenda in 2022 as well. Our senior legal counsel started off by scoping the task and priorities, due to the extensive upcoming international legislation such as the taxonomy, CSRD, CSDD and European Green Deal. Legal ESG training and awareness sessions have been conducted to onboard the entire legal team on the right mindset. The code of conduct and supplier agreements have also been updated to ensure better ESG compliance and facilitation of a new in-house legal ESG network was initiated.