About

Described as an ‘analytic legal counsel with over 20 years’ experience in the technology and media industries’ by nominating sources, Dr Peter Macheiner is head of the legal function of medical diagnostics provider SYNLAB Group. The company has a truly international operation, and Dr Macheiner’s responsibilities cover more than 35 countries across 4 continents. The SYNLAB Group legal function was not established when he joined in 2009, and he had to ‘build and structure the team from scratch’. Alongside this, Dr Macheiner was keenly aware that the company’s culture of innovation meant that ‘the whole legal department must be adapted to such changes at the same speed as the group’, and the legal function that he has built is therefore both highly versatile and flexible. As well as this, he has a number of personal highlights built up over the course of his tenure, and mentions one in particular: ‘One of my top highlights was a very large and long-lasting litigation involving several departments, in which I was able to combine legal advice with management skills in order to get a large variety of colleagues from different departments to co-operate in an excellent manner. I was also able to keep them motivated over a very long period to go the extra mile in order to bring that litigation to a successful conclusion’. As to how to successfully deal with these and other prominent projects, Dr Macheiner’s strategy is to ‘focus on them in as simple a manner as possible in order to come to the necessary business decision’.