About

Michael Fritz has been working for Deutsche Bahn for 14 years and has built a ‘punchy legal department that can easily hold a candle to any employment law boutique’, say peers. Deutsche Bahn is a company with over 300,000 employees that is frequently subject of media coverage. Fritz has impressed by being able to ‘ingeniously and on a very high level, bundle, structure and overcome the countless legal and political challenges within the company’. One recipe for success may be his approach to ‘utilise legal knowledge based on project work’ adopting a concept of ‘flexible team organisation’. This approach has helped him to overcome challenges such as several pay disputes with unions and the preparation of the planned (and cancelled last minute) IPO of Deutsche Bahn. Often finding solutions meeting such complex requirements needs ‘sensitive communication with internal departments, advocacy groups and often also unions’. If Fritz employs external counsel he feels success is based on one assumption: ‘we have learnt not to see each other as service provider and contracting entity but as partners who work on the same issue’. He does not believe that in-house counsel are less independent than lawyers at law firms: ‘If the board asks for a legal opinion a straight forward reply is needed’. If then the request is to consider alternative solutions, ‘are we not giving a service that is any different to what an external counsel would have done in the same situation’?