About

Dr Timm Ebner joined Heraeus in July 2012, and was made head of corporate affairs legal in January 2013; prior to this he was a senior associate with Hengeler Mueller in Frankfurt. He has been at the forefront of a number of impressive projects during his tenure. ‘In 2013, Heraeus sold its globally operating dental business to a Japanese company’, he recalls, ‘with the dental business comprising 20 sites with nearly 1,400 employees. The project strengthened my capabilities as an in-house counsel insofar as it required me to take advantages of all the resources of our legal department, a close cooperation with colleagues from the dental business, and a good coordination with other corporate departments, such as HR, tax, accounting or EHS’. In order to achieve his team’s success, Dr Ebner has had a huge role to play in improving its internal efficiency. Firstly, he highlights his work to ‘standardise a significant number of legal documents and create a variety of templates for internal and external use, such as for corporate policies and guidelines. This standardisation significantly reduced the internal administrative burden within the legal department and beyond’. Secondly, Dr Ebner urged his team to ‘document all processes, especially those with interfaces to other departments’, which allowed the team to streamline its service portfolio and value proposition. He has also been intensively involved with innovation and the use of new legal technology with the business: ‘We have implemented a new IT-tool for the management of all our legal entities worldwide, which facilitates our corporate housekeeping and renders many handmade documents obsolete’. Dr Ebner’s own professional philosophy, which he shares with his team, is one of pragmatism and constant focus on the strategic goals of the business; this looks set to benefit him and Heraeus going into the future.