Team size: Three

Key team members: Claudia Simon, Daniela Pfeiffer, Sandra Krebs

Could you share an example of a time when you came up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works and did not come at a large expense?

Contract simplification and creation of templates together with customise trainings: This project may not sound very sophisticated but it was a huge effort to really understand the different contracts (in the areas of procurement, sales and human resources) and set up very clear and easy to use contract templates that the colleagues can fill out by themselves without further input from legal (with comments and support in the document). With this we created a database and concluded tailor-made training (for separate target groups) so that everyone understands how to use the contracts and knows when they need to contact legal for further advice. This empowers our colleagues and gives them ownership while making their work easier as the contracts are not long and hard to read but easy to use and in words and terms that can be understood easily by non-lawyers.

Apart from legal matters, has the team worked on other company initiatives?

Legal director leads the ethics and compliance committee is co-sponsor of our diversity and inclusion initiative — ‘come as you are’ — part of many working groups in the work connected to combability of work and family, part of the team that works on the implementation of the DRS system in Austria. All these topics are very important to the culture of our organisation and especially close to our hearts as a legal team.

Can you sum up the team culture/ethos in one sentence?

To support the organisation by providing pragmatic, business-minded advice, while protecting the company from risk in the most efficient manner.

When we developed this, we focused on two aspects: Closeness to and trust of the business as well as team spirit. We believe, that in order to give the best advice to the business it is important that our colleagues include us at early stages of projects and ideas so that we can give input and shape outcomes already when strategies and processes are set up. This is enabled by the colleagues trusting us not to make things more complicated if not necessary and also not to blame or lecture them if and when they are thinking out of the box. Our aim is to find solutions that work best for the organisation together with the other functions rather than just saying no to proposals.

Secondly the team works truly as one – taking into consideration personal strengths and preferences, especially when it comes to practical topics such as to the part time engagement of the team members, and not trying to be ahead or better than the others but truly winning as one team only.