What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

With our partner T-Systems, we are creating a sovereign cloud for Germany. Aimed at highly regulated customers and the public sector, the sovereign cloud initiative is one of the most ambitious technical and infrastructure projects of Google Cloud today. The technical implementations range from advanced encryption methods and auditing capabilities today to the takeover of end-to-end operations for a discrete data centre by T-Systems at a later stage. Google additionally extended its partnership with Deutsche Telekom in the networking area.

The strategic partnership closed between Deutsche Bank, and Google Cloud is a lighthouse project in the German cloud market. The project intends to allow Deutsche Bank to “redefine banking” with many projects within the partnership at the forefront of cloud technology, ranging from co-innovation to workload automation.

With a particular focus on Germany’s highly regulated banking industry, Google Cloud launched several projects with customers around topics such as migration of legacy systems and compliance optimisation.

We continue to see high demand from customers for our AI-ML solutions and an increasing demand from German customers in our security portfolio.

How do you feel the pandemic has changed the world of work for in-house counsel and the function of the general counsel?

The actual in-house work at Google has not changed significantly. Google’s systems have already allowed for distributed work long before the pandemic. So, for most counsel, the shift to the home office was a matter of a day to get settled in. We are pleased to see that colleagues from more traditional industries and law firms have adapted very quickly so that we can collaborate much more efficiently online, such as using Google Workspace with our outside counsel and even lawyers from other companies. This can significantly speed up the negotiation process.

With a limited return to office policy, team leads need to become more strategic in team meetings and events to ensure that teams really stay connected. Legal depends on a tightly knit team in which information flows easily in order to provide the client with the best possible advice. Therefore, maintaining a culture of trust and informal communication is vital.

How much influence do you, as a general counsel, have on the diversity and inclusion policies of your organisation?

Google places great emphasis on these topics. Legal is present in the company with several initiatives and organisations. For example, Google’s President of Global Affairs — Kent Walker — is an inaugural member of the company’s DEI Advisory Council. The legal organisation takes part in a number of annual training sessions for colleagues in the DEI space – including actionable items for everyday conduct and the hiring process.