Team size: 27

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crises, and how does your legal strategy align with the broader business strategy to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

In times of instability or crisis, I believe culture is the most important factor. For me, it is essential to cultivate an environment that embraces change and adaptation, enabling us to respond effectively to unexpected challenges while fostering innovation and learning. Transparency, engagement, and collaboration are key elements of this culture. This includes a feedback culture built on psychological safety and trust, as well as open communication that encourages active participation from all team members. By promoting this approach, I empower my team to take responsibility and make decisions independently, without needing to seek approval from me or their managers for every step. Establishing such a culture ensures that my legal strategy remains aligned with the broader business strategy, strengthening the organisational resilience of our Group.

What are the main cases or transactions that you have been involved in recently?

There are two main transactions to mention here. Firstly, we took over the Latin American business of an American insurance group. One of the major challenges here was coordinating the many jurisdictions involved and receiving the regulatory and anti-trust clearances in each jurisdiction. Secondly, we carried out an increase of the share capital of Talanx AG from authorised capital with the exclusion of subscription rights and with accelerated bookbuilding.

How have you integrated technology into your legal processes, and what impact has this had on efficiency and compliance?

We use our own developed Generative Pretrained Transformer (HDI GPT), based on GPT-4.0, in full compliance with our internal data protection and compliance requirements. All use cases and the proprietary chatbot operate within private cloud instances that meet all regulatory and security-related standards. This is ensured through appropriate agreements and contractual arrangements.

The cloud provider has no access to internal data, and the language model is used directly without relying on an external chatbot, as is the case with ChatGPT. Significant efficiency gains have already been achieved in tasks such as summarising texts and pre-formulating emails. However, the main challenge remains that none of the current applications can yet be trained using data from relevant German legal databases, limiting its specific application in a legal context. Nonetheless, we anticipate significant progress in this area in the coming months.

What do you see as the major legal challenges for businesses in Germany over the next five years, and how are you preparing to address them?

From a legal perspective, I see the biggest challenges in the coming years arising from increasing regulation, particularly in the areas of sustainability, AI, and insurance supervisory law. For a globally active group like ours, growing regulatory requirements add complexity and must be integrated into cost-efficient global processes, such as data collection and monitoring systems. The key challenge will be to ensure that these processes remain efficient and do not hinder internal workflows.