Team size: Seven 

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

Over the past year the team has enabled Pleo to enter into eight new jurisdictions and are now offering our spend management solution to customers in 16 European countries. As the Pleo group has been through hypergrowth in challenging markets conditions, the team has also supported with strategic organisational changes to implement the shift to ‘growth through focus and efficiency’. To enable the journey from start-up to scale-up the team focuses on initiates supporting operational maturity while ensure that our products meet our regulatory obligations as an E-money institution. In additional thereto, the team contributed to the successfully steer the company through it’s first ordinary inspection by the Danish Financial Superviosry Authority.  

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? 

As we are scaling up, we are committed to focus on scalability and automation in all core operations. To set us up to successfully 100+ new people on a monthly basis during our hypergrowth, Nicolai Bahmann orchastested implementation of a smooth process of production and storage of employment contracts in all jurisdictions by working creatively with our vendors to integrate with existing tools for a bespoke solution.  

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

Generative AI will be the solution to make legal technology truely work to enable legal teams. The opportunity to drive self-serve that is “on-demand” will empower the rest of the organisation to solve simple questions autonomously and ensure that the legal team can focuse on creating value by solving the complex problems that drives Pleo towards our strategic goals.  

How do you suggest in-house departments build strong relationships with business partners? 

Legal teams should act as true business partners themselves. Focus on understanding the problems we are trying to solve, be curious, act as a sounding board, share your opinion (also outside of the strictly legal aspects) and ask for feedback. When collaborating with stakeholders make sure you are personable and human.  

If you had to give advice to an aspiring in-house lawyer or general counsel, what would it be and why? 

This is my first general counsel role, first (hypergrowth) start-up, first fintech and first true in-house role (other than a secondment 10 years ago) so my learnings are probably very specific to those particular circumstances. My best advice is to ask questions, never assume, be curious to understand what we are trying to solve for and accept that sometimes done is better than perfect.