Team size: 21

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

Our legal team has evolved from being an in-house legal team with Bestseller as the sole client to now being the in-house legal team of the entire Heartland group, providing legal advice to various companies and enterprises. Consequently, our team is involved on a day-to-day basis in diverse legal issues in terms of nature, size, and complexity. We always strive to take advantage of the many synergies that arise.

As the legal department of a group focusing on several areas such as fashion, retail, technology, sustainability, business innovation, renewables, and many more, one of our focus areas during the past year has been the use of generative AI, which is evolving rapidly across our businesses. Generative AI entails a large number and variety of opportunities and benefits but also requires careful oversight and governance to ensure that it is always used with care and caution. Therefore, we have put a lot of effort into defining a GenAI policy along with a set of guidelines and a tool list and supplemented those with compliance training sessions to enable our colleagues to navigate the area of generative AI.

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

To be successful as an in-house lawyer, the central focus must always be the business objective when providing legal advice and guidance. The legal department is a support function to the core business, and we are not here to point out wrongdoings but to ensure that the company succeeds in whatever the business objective may be. We maintain a commercial mindset, aiming to always provide risk-based legal advice that can be easily implemented. We help create structure and drive projects so our business partners can focus on their core abilities and tasks, such as creativity and business development. Ultimately, we believe this approach encourages the business to seek our advice to a greater extent.

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

Bestseller is a company within which we refer to ourselves as the Bestseller family. This means that we regard each other as family members whom we need to assist in the best way possible. If one colleague cannot help with a specific query, they make sure to at least help find another colleague who can. We believe this is the best way to create an internal network in the company and build strong relationships across teams.

We aim to take this Bestseller way of working and expand it to the companies we assist within the Heartland portfolio, to become an even larger family where help is always close by.

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

I strive to draw attention to the great value that in-house lawyers add to the businesses in which they operate and to contribute to the best possible conditions for my in-house legal colleagues in Danish companies. This is also why I take an active part in the Danish Corporate Counsel Association (Danske Virksomhedsjurister), where I am a member of the board. The Danish Corporate Counsel Association works to safeguard the professional interests of in-house lawyers vis-à-vis companies, organisations, authorities, and the rest of society, aiming to promote the recognition and understanding of the role of in-house lawyers in relation to the same.