About

Hamburg Commercial Bank (formerly HSH Nordbank) is a commercial bank in northern Europe with headquarters in Hamburg as well as Kiel, Germany. It is active in corporate and private banking and its head of legal and director is Dr Till Friedrich who assumed his current role in June 2019, having joined HSH Nordbank in August 2014. Prior to moving in-house, he worked in private practice as an associate at Dechert. During the past few years, Friedrich has been contributing substantially to the business’s major deals and transactions. For example, between 2017 and 2018, he advised on the sales process and privatisation (signing and closing) of HSH Nordbank (including rebranding and the reorganisational process from a publicly owned Landesbank to private equity-owned private bank), especially in areas of due diligence and negotiation process regarding the old and new shareholder as well as ECB, Directorate-General for Competition (DG Comp) and deposit protection schemes. More recently, he has been helping the bank restructure its hybrid capital structure, including the termination of AT1-Instruments and the counselling in various related lawsuits. His current role is characterised by ‘the focus on strategic topics such as bank’s privatisation and the current restructuring programme’, he says. From his point of view, ‘in-house legal has to strike a balance between being a relevant (HR) cost factor on one hand and being included in all relevant (strategic and business) projects on the other hand. This can only be achieved by using digitalisation technology and a clear focus on legal core issues (being handled internally without external support)’.