Team size: Five

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

Providing support to the business on various pandemic-related matters in the real asset business, including all legal aspects of the effect of lockdowns on commercial tenants on the one side but also on all potential (and sometimes new) obligations of landlords in those situations. The effects of the pandemic on real asset financings turned out to be another major topic that required a lot of inhouse expertise to be handled adequately.

On the transactional side, two recent transactions of ours have been published. The first is the development of a life science business campus in the UK. We invested £900m to create a life science industry cluster with the plan to give home to up to 5,000 highly qualified jobs once finished. The second is the sale of 11 logistics properties across Germany in a portfolio in 2022. The portfolio represented all properties of a German open-ended fund for institutional investors and marks one of the largest transactions of this kind in the recent past in Germany.

On a more general level, the number of high-volume transactions in real assets (such as infrastructure or real estate investments) in a very challenging environment. Competition in the markets has further increased, speed of reaction and creativity in finding solutions for legal issues in those transactions have become even more decisive in getting the transaction secured.

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

There are the obvious changes: Working more remotely and gathering more virtually than in person have changed workstyles and ways of collaboration. These challenges might have not been as massive for people working at bigger or international institutions than for people working in smaller or more local organisations, since being employed at an international institution has always contained working across various locations and in virtual teams. In that sense, my perception is that the pandemic has, in particular, led to an adjustment of workstyles for in-house counsel independent of size and geographical reach of the employer. This adjustment in combination with a generally less formal communication has simplified cooperation across firms and their in-house legal departments.

The pandemic has put further emphasis on a key requirement for in-house counsel: Proactively providing immediate and reliable support for the business. The business, more than ever, needed pragmatic legal advice at short notice. In-house counsel have to show judgement and willingness to take decisions and must train themselves in differentiating between the real essentials and nice-to-haves.

Having said that, the pandemic and the need for pragmatic and fast advice has, on many occasions, reduced involvement of outside counsel and strengthened the role of in-house legal.