About

Martin Fischer has positioned the legal department of chemical industry company Celanese more closely to commercial and strategic matters. This approach resulted from his observation that ‘the task of in-house counsel has changed from legal advisor to commercial advisor, which reflects precisely how I perceive this function’. The streamlined department faces a multitude of responsibilities, a challenge that Fischer meets by ‘permanently increasing efficiency’. However, he has also purposefully grown the team, and since he started heading the legal department three years ago he has been able to take two experienced lawyers from magic circle firms. One of the major challenges in his career has been the disincorporation of the company’s global environmental liabilities in 2012, which it inherited during its spin-off from Höchst in 1999, leading to a significant risk reduction. Other challenges were factory closures in France and Spain in 2013, both of which were completed ‘in a respectful manner after an unfortunately unsuccessful sales attempt’. Fischer values the international way of working, ‘particularly bearing in mind the company’s eventful past as a former Höchst division, followed by the takeover and sale by Blackstone and the relocation of its headquarters from Höchst to Texas’. Throughout any of these processes it is the legal department which is key in ensuring a smooth communication: ‘it has to translate, both from legal to commercial as well as between different departments, languages, legal frameworks and cultures’. Fischer’s regard for the importance of communication also reflected in his view of in-house counsel who are ‘equally responsible for successful cooperation with law firms; however, law firms have to ‘understand the business, products and markets of their clients’.