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

Over the past year, we advised in a lot of interesting and ground breaking global technology projects with our valued and longstanding business partners that will bear fruit in the years to come and will make exciting headlines. All of those included complex commercial and IP issues and several also IT and data privacy related questions. Besides the already very successful venture arm, TDK has put a lot of energy in its internal start-up incubator project “Kindergarten” that I and my team take care of on a global basis. Their successful start-up Mitai that offers electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) services is already in the market. Advising start-ups is totally different from the daily legal advisory in a large globally operating enterprise like TDK in general and me and my team find that kind of work quite refreshing and inspiring. And we could bring in a lot of our experience in TDK’s “normal” business to e.g. speed things up.

How important is choosing to work with external lawyers who align with your company’s values? 

In general, when it comes to the choice of external lawyers, I am quite selective. I spent the first part of my legal career in a major US law-firm in Tokyo and in Frankfurt. From the very early days in the law-firm, I recognized that it is very important to understand what the client stands for in the market and society. It was not that you needed to identify yourself with the same values. But if you could, the better. But every time I was able to share the core values of the client and to align my work alongside them, I realized that I am definitely the better advisor and the clients appreciated that very much. From my current inhouse position’s perspective, I expect the same now from my external partners. TDK’s corporate motto is “contribute to culture and industry through creativity” and our principles are “vision” “courage” and “trust”. These are the basic parameters you have to align with when you want to work with us, also in legal work – and yes, also legal work should be creative and made with vision. And this approach is also recognized and appreciated by our internal clients.

How do you suggest in-house lawyers build strong relationships with business partners? 

Building strong professional and also personal relationships with internal and external business partners is one of the most important aspects of what we legal folks should do. Especially, when you are a GC or senior counsel, this is actually expected by your management. The times, when a lawyer sat down in its office and only came up when things were already boiling are over. Modern counsel need to be ahead of the curve and know their company’s business. And having a strong and trusted relationship with your internal and external business partners is an essential part of this. I am always preaching my team members of all seniority levels to be close to the actual business, and also the underlying technology. Only when your partners feel that you understand them and only when you speak their language, you can add value and will be taken seriously. To strengthen the relationships within our internal partners within TDK, we conducted a satisfaction survey and asked over 3.000 people anonymously. I can say that we learned a lot of things what we can do even better. On top of that, what we do is a people’s business and personal relationships will be valued as trust markers.