Team size: 13

Key team members: Dorthe Rosenkilde Saunders, group general counsel, vice president for legal, compliance and risk management

Major legal advisers: Bird & Bird, Plesner, Kromann

Spotlight on Milestone Systems

Milestone Systems’ legal team has been on a growth journey since January 2022. The team now consists of 13 fulltime employees across the globe. To be scalable and best support our organisation, the team is split into the following roles: legal business partners supporting each business unit; regional counsels supporting the regions in which we operate; specialists such as risk management, compliance, ESG and IP rights; and project leads supporting each of our large, cross functional strategic initiatives.

Our team is diverse, especially in terms of cultural backgrounds, with seven different nationalities represented. This means that we do not all think alike, and we challenge each other every day. With a “disagree and commit” approach, we manage the conflicts that naturally arise in a culturally diverse team, and we channel the difference of opinion into finding the best commercially viable legal solutions for our organisation.

One of our goals in 2023 is to become an even more scalable, value adding partner to our organisation. In-house legal teams truly bring value to the organisations they support if they know the business, strategy, products, and risk appetite of each business unit.

Gaining such in-depth knowledge is achieved by being an integrated part of all strategy, prioritisation, product, and process meetings within the business unit in question. Building knowledge this extent means that our team knows what legal pain points the unit faces, knows what standard documents they need and builds trust between us and them. Finally, focusing on finding commercially viable and legally sound solutions to business needs builds a great relationship between the legal team and the organisation around us. Insisting on the best legal solution, without a focus on the commercial needs, will do the opposite.

We are welcoming the development of AI to assist the legal team with drafting standard contracts, meeting notes, policies, and guidelines. Using tools to assist with such tasks will free up more time for the in-house counsels to aid the organisation where it really counts and adds value.

At Milestone Systems, we work with several external law firms around the world. We pick the best firms to work with, basing such assessment the area each firm excels. We no longer use one or two firms for all areas of the law.

It is surprising how often the external law firms seemingly forget how skilled and professional the in-house teams have become. We mainly outsource tasks to external firms because we either do not have the time or resources to handle a task ourselves, or we do not have the necessary expertise in-house.