About

Beginning with Sodexo in 2014, prior to which he had an approximately nine-year spell with the NTT Group, Ingo Köhler-Bartels – as part of the Sodexo global legal department – is now general counsel for Central Europe as well as a member of the regional leadership committee, German country committee and is also tasked with responsibility for all insurance and data privacy matters. ‘From the very beginning of my time with Sodexo’, Köhler-Bartels explains, ‘I had the objective of acting as a truly trusted business partner. To foster an intense communication and be and remain fully aware of the business goals, we have established an engagement model between legal counsel and the business on a first point of contact model instead of a single point of contact model. This sounds like only a tiny difference but has a bigger leverage. It helps to build teams but it does not necessarily bind people together. As such it is more agile and also respects the human aspect in a virtual team’. His latest challenge is the implementation of a new regional structure. ‘In September 2018 we built the Central European region within Sodexo enclosing eight countries. For the legal function this meant and still means a lot of work around compliance, statutory, governance and corporate matters’. Köhler-Bartels supports the in-house legal world and believes it has even more to give to the business landscape. ‘I think it is time to focus on the in-house role much more’, he states. ‘While it is big business and we could not operate without the expertise the external advisors and law firms bring and the risks they take, it is a reciprocal relationship; they need us as well. In the future, legal aspects may become a more integral part of businesses and, as such, legal counsel will be asked to understand themselves as a more integral part of the business. The need for legal expertise will also change – there is much more to be evaluated and handled than recurrent limitation of liability clauses’.