Team size: 14 (3 currently on maternity leave)

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?

Some time ago we started to create a standard set of contracts (including fill-in assistance) that can be used by all our departments. This collection of standard contracts is now very large and varied and is constantly being updated and expanded, saving us both human and financial resources. The implementation of an efficient trademark monitoring system has also been extremely useful in providing a daily overview of third-party trademark applications, thus reducing the ongoing workload and enabling us to take timely protective measures for our own trademarks. We have implemented an overview of legal FAQs on our corporate intranet, which speeds up the answering of simple legal questions, and reduces internal departmental effort.

The applicability of the GDPR was accompanied by a Group-wide project in which the Legal department played a leading role. As a result of this and in order to ensure data protection compliant behavior, various templates — such as for data protection declarations —, working techniques and instructions —in connection with data subject inquiries and many more — were created for this purpose, which are used by all departments. During the implementation, a directory of processing activities was also created in cooperation with the company’s own IT company, which is used throughout the Group. All the above-mentioned measures resulting from the project have led to a more efficient and effective handling of the issues as well as to a corresponding relief of the legal department.

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

Parts of our legal team are constantly involved in non-legal business initiatives. At EU level, for example, there are a number of sustainability workstreams within the EU Green Deal, which we support. A particularly important issue that we are currently working on is the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD). This awareness and knowledge transfer starts with our youngest employees — our apprentices — whom we inform about this topic. Recently, the apprentices even had the opportunity to speak at a Fairtrade conference in the Austrian Parliament. We also provide ongoing support to our compliance department — the most recent project in which our legal team has played a leading role is the implementation of a whistleblowing tool.

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

Our team stands for stability, continuity, cohesion, helpfulness and appreciation — these values have ensured agile and value-adding cooperation for many years. Starting with a team of 4 in 2010, we have grown to a very stable team of 14 in recent years. Of the employees, the longest has been with the company for 38 years. During challenging times, such as the pandemic, mutual support has helped us and strengthened the team structure even more. We support the company’s work/life balance initiatives in our team — opportunities to return to work after maternity leave and home office are flexible, accommodating and supported within the team. We show our appreciation for each other in our daily interactions, but also in small gestures that should not be underestimated — every employee receives a personal gift and a homemade cake on his or her birthday, and we welcome the offspring of our colleagues in the same way: We are convinced that small gestures of appreciation make a big difference at the end of the day.