About

A part of the DHL in-house legal department since 2004, Brett Hattaway’s vast experience with the company makes him an indispensable part of its legal team. As vice president and head of legal for Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, he supervises a team of 25 lawyers with responsibility for all legal matters arising in relation to DHL’s Global Forwarding and Express businesses in over 80 countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States, Africa, and the Middle East, which generate several billion US dollars in annual turnover and employ approximately 20,000 people. Hattaway’s extended and extremely successful period with DHL elicits a number of particular highlights, but when pressed he chooses to mention projects which have had an appreciable effect on the overall capabilities of the legal function as a whole, highlighting his collaborative and business-focused approach. ‘Building a team of high performing legal professionals (now numbering approximately 25) who enable our group to function in some of the most challenging legal environments is by far the biggest highlight, and the accomplishment of which I am most proud’, he says. ‘Running an intern programme which has helped a number of junior lawyers and interns improve their skills and find permanent roles within DHL, law firms or companies has also been extremely rewarding, especially given that several of these interns have commented that working as part of the DHL legal team in East Europe, Middle East and Africa was the best experience of their professional lives to date. Finally, the fact that each year since I have been in the role, the East Europe, Middle East and Africa legal team of which I have the privilege to guide ranks among the top one or two teams globally within Deutsche Post DHL’s business partner satisfaction survey, and we have traditionally achieved this goal with half (or less) the number of employees that are found in other comparably-sized regional legal departments’.