Could you share an example of a time when you came up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works and did not come at a large expense?  

Bad Debt “Haircut” Project 

SEE team was handling 84 outstanding bad debt cases amounting to €12.5m of overdue receivables – case load, work hours and costs were extravagant. I had all cases filtered by amount and aging – 16 cases amounted to €10m, and 68 cases amounted to €2.5m. After assessing the status and estimated success rate of collection for each case, my proposal to SEE Management was to attempt a “haircut” for the 68 cases. One lawyer was assigned to contact all 68 defendants and propose a 50% debt write off in case 50% of the debt was paid within the next year. The project was concluded in two months, with no court fees, no external counsel fees and approximately 80% of the cases were settled successfully. 

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

As SEE compliance officer, I led an exercise aiming to identify, map, assess and mitigate SEE country risks – by virtue of compiling compliance risk assessment sheets (CRAs) for all SEE adidas subsidiaries. 

Assessment includes a wide variety of risk scenarios, likelihood of occurrence, repercussions (monetary and other) regarding adidas business across all functions and spectrums (for example, risk of bribery, theft, procurement fraud, competition law), mitigation measures mapping and implementation thereof.  

How important is choosing to work with external lawyers who align with your company’s values? Are you likely to reconsider what firms you work with based on this?   

Top-performing organisations are undoubtedly driven by values and a value-based culture. Values behaviours shape adidas culture, which is the one thing competitors cannot copy; they drive individual and company performance, they drive profit, they attract and inspire customers, partners and employees. 

Partnering up with external law firms who share and live adidas values and behaviours is the only way to partner up successfully – and a clear expectation from the organisation.   

How our law partners operate, how they think, how they decide, and how they prioritise is essential to the success of an in-house legal team, and effectively to the business and company’s success overall. Repercussions in the case of failure may be internal (team failure, project derailment) as well as external (for example, reputational, or profit).  

It is therefore of paramount importance to choose partners who align with adidas values and behaviours, and this assessment is done on a day-to-day basis – so yes, there is always room to reconsider.