Team size: 4

What are the projects that you are most proud of working on over the past 12 months?

The company is in a growth (scale up) phase, which means that the needs of the business change all the time. We also operate in a highly regulated environment, which means we always need to combine the need for speed with the need for compliance. In this phase, I managed to build a stable legal team that proactively supports the business and is seen as a true strategic partner and trusted advisor. We proactively flagged key topics and worked hard on these to improve.

Have you had any experiences during your career as a lawyer that stand out as particularly unique or interesting?

I have always believed that experiences outside of the legal field make you a better (in-house) lawyer. They also equip you to venture outside just your legal remit, which makes the work more interesting. I have done a Masters degree in American Literature and Culture after my first job as a lawyer at Clifford Chance, I have done European policy work in Paris for one of the Dutch financial regulators and, last but not least, I owned a legal tech company where I built a law firm on top. All of these experiences help me to be a better lawyer and leader today.

What do you think are the most important attributes for a modern in-house counsel to possess?

Business and social intelligence truly come first. Do you understand the product, and do you understand what the person you are helping wants or what drives them? The second one is eagerness and curiosity – are you really interested and willing to learn all there is about the product and the people you work with? You need to be able to be creative, to create possibilities instead of flagging issues. Finally, integrating AI as a tool into your daily work is vital in terms of efficiency and getting the profession to the next level.

Based on your experiences in the past year, are there any trends in the legal or business world that you are keeping an eye on, of which you think other in-house lawyers should be mindful?

Following Mario Draghi’s report and Trump becoming president, we will see a regress of overcomplicated and layered EU regulation. The EU will try to simplify regulation to remain competitive, but will still hang on tight to its most important milestones (e.g. GDPR) to counter Big Tech. It will be interesting to see whether the EU can achieve harmonisation in a more effective manner: this in itself is a challenge. One of the items we are keeping a close eye on in this regard is the further specification of the AML Regulation.