About

Axel Springer publishes, among others, newspapers Bild and Die Welt and has subsidiaries in France, Spain, Switzerland and Russia. The company is increasingly directing its attention to digital business and new business models, a development that entails changes in how Konrad Wartenberg’s legal department operates to support and influence this shift. Wartenberg emphasises the legal department’s need to ‘internalise that we have to turn our attention towards the future, to actively focus on these new business models when advising, and to hire talent with the respective skills’. Wartenberg has also made changes to how the department works, standardising work procedures by using templates and introducing a ‘4-eyes-principle because team work increases quality’. He has also reduced the number of external advisors to a small circle of firms. He enjoys core legal advisory work: ‘I don’t see myself only as the manager of a team of internal and external advisors; I work with the team on legal matters’.