About

Since 2011, Alexander Bordolo has been successfully building and growing the German legal department of British conglomerate Johnson Matthey with one of his most recent initiatives being the implementation of a ‘legal champions programme’ that ‘identifies and purposefully trains particularly talented non-lawyers stemming from our operative business so that they can eventually take over certain contract design matters from the legal department’. This initiative has its roots in Bordolo’s overall high esteem for operative business teams, as ‘they are the ones who conduct business based on our legal advice’. Bordolo views his role as ‘going beyond the sole function as legal counsel’ and who relishes the opportunity to ‘think outside the legal box and contribute to the company’s business development’. A particular success has been the development and implementation of a company-wide anti-corruption policy. He says of successful external law firms, they are able to ‘grasp every detail of the client’s business’ because ‘products developed externally are often not suited to be implemented, in which case firms are unable to take the load off the in-house department’.