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Internally, the Telefónica Global Services legal team’s work has been ‘all about digitalisation’ recently, according to general counsel in Germany Florian Engel: ‘We are streamlining contractual works and processes by implementation of the company’s own “legal tech” such as a tool for proposing appropriate contract clauses in a negotiation software already, which might lead to a final, in the best way executed, contract version without the need of a legal counsel’s involvement at all’. When asked about the most important projects worked upon over the past two years, Engel opts for the huge expansion of Telefónica Global Services’ responsibilities out from Telefónica Group. ‘We were originally set up as a group internal service centre for Telefónica Group companies only’, he explains. ’Now, the services of this subgroup are to be opened up to group-external telecommunication companies worldwide. For around two years our main project has been setting a completely new legal framework for our turnaround from a purely internal group service centre to a recognised and state-of-the-art branch service provider for other telecommunication companies worldwide’. With major regulatory changes affecting the teams work to an increasingly large extent, the team relies on a number of highly qualified individuals to safeguard its business fortunes, with Engel mentioning his colleague Thomas Marx as having made a particularly strong contribution on the back of his support of the digitalisation of contract handling. Engel is convinced of the efficacy of digitalisation to a modern general counsel. ‘As a general trend for in-house legal counselling, I can state that the life-cycles of commercial arrangements are becoming significantly shorter. We need to find new ways, processes and infrastructure to still give substantial legal advice on the one hand and to meet the shorter deadlines on the other, which means digitalisation and even automisation in core parts of the legal department’, he concludes.