About

Agnieszka Mögelin-Zinger is a legal counsel in E.ON’s M&A team in Düsseldorf but regularly draws on resources worldwide when working on projects. This international outlook is not surprising for an energy company that has a global turnover of over €130bn. In her role Mögelin-Zinger works closely with the commercial M&A team and designs and steers transactions from the very beginning. A particular career highlight has been the entry in the Turkish market, for the company a very significant step which was successfully completed within a period of months; ‘a highlight from a legal and cultural perspective’. A particular challenge for the legal M&A team is to centrally manage and direct transactions, involving heads of various departments around the globe. ‘What is required is diplomacy and pragmatism; you cannot reach the project team with pure legal speech’. She advises her company on its global M&A projects and is also involved in ‘questions as to if and why we should invest or de-invest somewhere’. Law firms have to ‘consider the commercial implications of every single legal issue’. A memo ‘without price tags and clear recommendations has almost no value’. But in-house counsel have to do their part. She does not, for example, give assignments on Friday, but instead waits until Monday as ‘avoiding weekend work has led to a clear increase in quality’.