About

Praised as ‘innovative, professional and forward thinking’ as well as having ‘strong analytical skills and good sense of judgement’ by a nominator, Dr Nikolai Vokuhl is an excellent lawyer with expertise in all areas of law, particularly in the fields of commercial and corporate law. After obtaining a PhD degree while working as a research assistant at Bucerius Law School, he started to work as a corporate and securities lawyer at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer in Frankfurt after finishing his legal training. Dr Vokuhl started his in-house legal career in 2013 when he joined Amazon Germany to advise on a business line – “hardlines” which includes all electrical devices, sports gear, tools, toys, musical instruments and more – in all legal issues. ‘This included inter alia general commercial law, anti-trust law, competition law, data protection law, consumer rights, IP and IT, all fields I have not advised on before. But I was excited for the challenge and curious to learn new things and it was one of the best decisions ever (despite the natural struggles when I started). Besides, I also took care of all corporate issues for Amazon in Germany’, he comments. In June 2017, he took on the challenge of becoming the general counsel of windeln.de, a listed German e-commerce retailer for baby and children’s products (the German diapers.com). He then moved to HUGO BOSS in March 2019, leading a global team of 30 members as general counsel for the group, responsible for all legal aspects. Dr Vokuhl thinks there will be two major themes shaping the in-house legal role (and have shaped it in the past): one is the increasing complexity of the legal environment and the other one is the challenge that in-house lawyers are asked to achieve more and work on more tasks with less resources. According to Dr Vokuhl, one way to tackle those issues is digitalisation. ‘In my view, recurring standard tasks will be automated in the future, which frees up resources for in-house lawyers to focus on more complicated issues, which will also help reduce the use of outside counsel in the future. Furthermore, I think that due to the increasing complexity of legal environments and the internationality of in-house legal work, in-house legal advisors will be more and more asked to act as risk assessors and balancers (the question “what would you do” will be asked to in-house lawyers more often). This requires in-house lawyers to have a very thorough understanding of the business of its company to be able to take into account all major aspects and balance them correctly’, he says.