Key team members: Anton Mikkelsen, Rikke Nybroe, Claus Møller Thamdrup

Can you give an idea of the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

Coloplast’s Danish legal team has recently been involved in the €2,155 (around DKK16bn) acquisition of ATOS Medical – the biggest acquisition in Coloplast’s history. The Danish legal team led all legal tracks from structure, due diligence, transaction documents, financing, and merger filings until closing. They worked closely with the global legal team and across all functional areas involved in the transaction. The transaction was closed in January 2022.

Later the same year, the legal team and Group Finance led Coloplast’s first-ever EMTN programme to finance the acquisition. In May 2022, Coloplast (through a Dutch SPV) issued bonds totalling €2.2bn. Additionally, the legal team supports launching new connected digital products where personal data plays a significant role. These products are innovative and pose different challenges from a legal perspective compared to the existing products in Coloplast’s portfolio.

How do you suggest in-house departments build strong relationships with business partners?

To be a successful legal team, you need to create value. You must act as a true partner and become an integrated part of the business operations. This requires a deep understanding of the business being conducted. The legal team must understand the market dynamics, business ambitions, possibilities and risks. Therefore, building strong ties with leaders on several organisational levels is essential.

To build relations, all legal team members should be active and reach out to stakeholders.

When understanding the business, the legal department can ensure that resources are allocated where it matters the most and, at the same time, proactively suggest pathways to achieve the business objectives. When stakeholders see the value created by the legal team, they are also keen to build relations with the legal team, which is a good starting point for a fruitful collaboration.

The unusual business environment created by the pandemic has been swiftly followed by the Ukraine crisis, and attendant supply chain costs rising and rising inflation. Are you now putting more emphasis on preparing for the unforeseen and, if so, what does this entail?

Indeed, the environment in which many companies do business has changed throughout and post-pandemic. The war in Ukraine also requires measures to be taken from a legal perspective to ensure that business can continue. Compared to life before the Covid-19 pandemic, suppliers have been considerably more reluctant to commit to prices and delivery times. At the same time, defaults from sub-suppliers have suddenly become a topic for discussion under the force majeure clauses. This is also a dilemma we are facing. One way to address the increased uncertainty in the supply chain is to include more mechanisms for frequent follow-up and notification obligations if the timing is challenged. Today, it simply requires closer monitoring. Looking into increased uncertainty means you need to build more flexibility in the contractual framework so you can adjust along the way and ultimately find a way out if the problems become too big. So yes, preparing for the unforeseen and being agile are crucial to navigating successfully through the environment we are currently in.