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

Pandora is rapidly growing, and global legal and IP have been involved and played a key role in many of Pandora’s strategical initiatives, such as driving Pandora’s ERP business transformation programme, launching Pandora’s global loyalty programme (My Pandora), the strategic alliances with brands such as Disney, introducing Pandora’s lab-grown Diamonds collection in certain key markets, as well as the global network expansion, which includes the expanding into new markets, opening of numerous new stores, relocations and refitting of existing stores, and acquiring the business of many of our third-party distributors and franchisees, integrating their business into Pandora’s own and operated network.

What would you say are the unique qualities required to be successful as an in-house lawyer in your industry?

The main unique and general qualities required to be successful as an in-house lawyer are business acumen and business partnering. For in-house lawyers in the jewellery industry, the more specific qualifications required depend on which position the in-house lawyer holds.

Generalist in-house lawyers must primarily be adaptable to the ever evolving business and legal landscape and be able to quickly synthesize laws and regulations in many disciplines to best advise the business.

Specialist in-house lawyers must have a deep understanding of their specific areas. As an example, our IPR and brand protection team must have a great insight into the jewellery market, the jewellery design creation and manufacturing processes to be capable of identifying, protecting, enforcing, and respecting intellectual property rights encountered in the processes. The commercial legal and network team must have a great understanding of how we commercially navigate in the different distribution channels, within sales and market communication. The corporate legal and supply team must possess competencies within many different areas, such as contract law, ESG, marketing law, IT law, corporate and capital market law, banking and finance, procurement, HR and manufacturing.

However, across legal teams, functional areas and countries, business acumen and business partnering are must-have capabilities for our in-house lawyers.

How have you fostered a closer collaboration between the legal department and your business counterparts?

The close collaboration between the legal department and business counterparts is based on a solid business partnering model, which includes a high degree of pro-activeness, knowledge sharing, trust, and flexibility. Also here, business acumen and business partnering play an important role. Having a mutual understanding of our business colleague’s roles, responsibilities and priorities is a must, for staying relevant to each other and getting the utmost out of the collaboration. We have structured our legal function so that all our in-house lawyers are dedicated legal business partners to specific functions and markets, and no functions/markets are left without a legal business partner. Besides providing legal advice and services, our in-house lawyers participate regularly in business events, meetings, joint workshops, training sessions etc., to remain updated on ongoing and future projects, within the relevant area/geography, and to proactively step in at an early stage. Remaining relevant and continuing to add value requires a constant dialogue, staying close to and bringing all the relevant stakeholders together.

Do you have a cause, business-related or otherwise, that you are passionate about?

Besides the many initiatives that Pandora, as an organisation, drives, there are two initiatives that I on a personal and business-related level am particularly excited about and support. The team which we are a part of, legal, risk and compliance, has established a DE&I task force, which, through different initiatives, is exploring how we as an organisation can increase DE&I awareness, and furthermore embed DE&I in our decision making and in our daily behavior. The global legal and IP team has also established a Legal tech task force, exploring legal tech opportunities, including AI, paving our way into the future.