About

With a rich pool of both legal expertise and in-house managerial experience to draw on, Milan-based Giovanni Cerutti has been general counsel and risk officer at leading IT services provider NTT DATA in the EMEA region since January 2012. Within the scope of his role he protects the group’s values and assets to benefit all stakeholders. Cerutti’s most recent success is connected with his attempts to solidify NTT Data’s regional head office. A large business in Japan but with limited presence elsewhere, Cerutti has had to evolve to help NTT Data through its expansion and growth into new markets, which he calls his ‘most challenging adventure professionally-speaking’. Building up business, compliance and governance functions in the complex group structure across multiple jurisdictions is an important task; it has been necessary to encourage ‘locating of responsibilities, empowerment and knowledge-sharing with things like training sessions’. A versatile and flexible legal manager, Cerutti oversees operation in 16 different legal systems, all of which present challenges through different languages, cultures, and different statutory routes. The level of complexity he deals with is ‘very high’, particularly as there is no international law in data protection, where countries that have adopted the EU directive still have differences ‘on the ground’. Cerutti has implemented a ‘balanced system’ to combat this, and has transformed the way the business uses external counsel; identifying law firms and leveraging them on a cross-jurisdictional basis. Also utilising in-house legal support, he saw fit to give more emphasis and importance on individual countries hiring in-house counsel in Italy, Germany, Romania and the UK. In addition to his in-house role, Cerutti acts as a board member of the European Company Lawyers Association, a position in which he promotes professionalism and integrity of business legal advisors within companies. Further proving his legitimacy as someone in a prominent position in the in-house community, in 2014 he co-authored the ECLA White Book on the Independence Mindset of Company Lawyers.