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

GroupM is the largest media agency group within the Nordics consisting of the media agencies EssenceMediacom, Mindshare and Wavemaker, the brand Acceleration, and the performance marketing unit GroupM Nexus.

The group’s legal team is led by Michelle Gullander who is based in Denmark (Copenhagen) and joined in 2021 to build the legal function across the Nordics (Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland). Michelle Gullander operates in a leadership role as well as working with the day-to-day support on all commercial contracts across the Nordics. She also serves as a board member of GroupM Denmark and is a member of the groups Nordic executive leadership team. The legal team is actively planning to expand its workforce by adding one more counsel in the coming months.

Being a smaller team in the region, the focus is to allocate its resources and efforts to areas that bring the most commercial value to the business which is centred around its clients. For instance, the team is producing business centric legal documents, processes and guidelines, and new legal documents are, before implementation, presented and discussed in the commercial excellence group (a group consisting of stakeholders across agencies and business support functions) to discuss and agree on the ways of working and ensure a holistic approach. The overarching goal for the legal team is to serve as an integral part of the business, functioning as a true business partner, by providing pragmatic advise whilst safeguarding the commercial interests of the group. The team often works under very tight deadlines, particularly in respect of client pitches and contract negotiations, and therefore, the team must be highly pragmatic, flexible, innovative, and proactive. This is also needed given the fast-moving nature of the media and tech industry, and the team acknowledges that it is crucial to be able to embrace change and to accept that the team will inevitably have to rethink and challenge its ways of working. To further streamline the workflow, the team is currently exploring the development and implementation of AI tools and robotics to automate some of the most time-consuming but straightforward assignments.

The most significant transactions the team recently worked on in 2022 was negotiating several substantial media planning and buying contracts (with a global producer of electronic devices, an international audio subscription service provider, and an affordable luxury jewellery company amongst others) thereby bringing in new business across the Nordic markets with a total yearly revenue of $120m. With the growth on the client side, GroupM in the Nordics is considered the fifth largest revenue market across GroupM’s global markets. Looking at the individual companies in the local markets across the Nordics, Denmark and Sweden are respectively number nine and ten of the global GroupM markets, and GroupM Sweden has become the largest media group locally. These wins have also led to the Nordic management being invited to GroupM’s global management meetings.

Looking forward, what technological advancements do you feel will impact the role of in-house legal teams in the future the most?

Overall, I believe that the adoption of technology will be paramount in order for in-house legal teams to remain competitive in the future. While legal professionals will still be needed to provide critical analysis and decision-making, legal teams that embrace these new technologies and learn how to use them will be well-positioned to drive greater efficiency, accuracy and effectiveness in their work while continuing to be a trusted advisor to their clients.

Currently, the conversation is centred around AI (not only in the legal industry) and rightfully so. I think AI has the potential to transform the way legal teams work for instance by automating repetitive tasks, such as document review, contract analysis and mark-up’s and carrying out due diligence and other compliance checks. I also believe AI will help legal teams to identify and mitigate risks more quickly and accurately, and ultimately leading to better risk management and more effective compliance. Specifically for law firms, I would think that tools that can assist with the various client specific obligations (such as anti-money laundering, data protection and providing fee statements) will be instrumental. By automating all these kind of tasks, legal teams can free up time to focus on higher-value activities such as strategic decision-making, advising the business and clients on complex legal issues and, to an even greater extent, building and maintaining trusted relationships with the business and clients.