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?

Responding to market developments (good and bad ones including crises) is part of the DNA of our organisation. Real Estate markets are cyclical and luckily enough the senior legal team as sufficient muscle memory round changing markets. Therefore, switching to “crises” mode was easy regardless of whether it did relate to the global pandemic, Ukraine or the changing interest environment. I feel very comfortable to react to ad-hoc challenges. Monitoring and managing political and regulatory risks which may impact our investments, and our company has become a priority. The legal team has been able to create awareness for climate change related challenges to the real estate industry very much ahead of the curve. Communicating with regulators but as well-being active in industryassociations iss part of my daily business. I am in the legal committee of BVI, the German fund industry association, and in the expert board for Bundesverband Wirtschaftskanzleien in Deutschland (association of major law firms in Germany) and Anwaltsspiegel (legal publication). Working on regulatory resilience is a growing key function of our legal department.

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

Given the state of the real estate market during the last years I had to manage a few restructuring situations (compared to the size of our European portfolio very limited) which tend to be legally and commercially challenging. With the recent stabilisation of the real estate markets the transaction activity restarted which keeps us busy, mainly by successfully rolling out various JVs with operating partners. The regulatory aspects of ESG are still a fast-developing area I am very much focused on – this did and does require a lot interdisciplinary and international collaboration to match technical and economical solutions with still changing regulatory requirements. Finally, legal operations and digitalisation has a high priority on my agenda: Legal Spent Management, Legal entity management incl. document productions tools are within the range of projects I have completed recently.

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

Personally, I am very tech-savvy and had been focusing on legal operations / digitalisation since many years. One key objective for us is to develop solutions integrating business and law. So, our legal spent management tool is by design able to provide data and budgets for the business and the legal teams. Whereas we are eager and excited to further integrate the use of AI supported tools, I am convinced that many legal use cases require rather “low tech” solutions: digital workflows, document production tools, smart databases are sometimes game changers.

What role does the legal department play in promoting and ensuring corporate social responsibility in your organisation?

As a regulated financial service company investing in estate, we are following an ambitious ESG agenda and are subject to an increasing level of regulatory oversight. The legal department is supporting our business to comply with the various ESG related regulations around the globe. Members of the legal team had been integrated into various ESG working groups to ensure compliance from firm level policies down to data gathering and reporting on individual asset level. The law department is running various DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) initiatives whereas one focus in Germany had been supporting female lawyers on their career path to partnership in our panel firms (known as “Focus Attorney Program”).