About

Having been employed by BMW since 2005, Dr Andreas Liepe has a large number of professional successes to look back on. He recalls his three-year assignment to China, where he stayed from 2011 until 2014. During that time, Liepe set up and led the local legal department for BMW Group in Beijing: ‘I started with two local headcounts, no dedicated office or budget and ended up running a highly professional, motivated, internally and externally accepted and empowered team which is seen as a vital part of the BMW Group legal department’. Dr Liepe explains that one success factor in this ‘was that I managed to attract and retain highly qualified lawyers in as competitive an environment as Beijing’. This helped Dr Liepe to achieve some notable successes over his time in China. He successfully negotiated several complex investment agreements relating to major automotive production facilities in the country, liaising directly with the respective Chinese city or provincial governments while doing so. In addition, he established a BMW subsidiary in China and was involved in the consolidation and growth of this business once formed. Moving back to Germany in 2014, he had similar success with an internationally-focused legal team, and after an internal reorganisation of the German legal department had to rebuild a new team consisting of previous members of the legal department and newly recruited lawyers. Dr Liepe put a strong focus on leadership and team building, which led to the creation of an impressive team dealing globally with a number of legal areas. As someone with a proven track record for excellence in building successful in-house legal teams, Dr Liepe provides some insight into his philosophy when doing so: ‘I put an emphasis on “active leadership”, hiring the right people, building a strong team, individually addressing and coaching each team member taking into consideration the different skill sets, valuing each team member individually and as a team, and most importantly empowering these individuals to work independently’.