About

Jarle Roar Sæbø is the country counsel and sole in-house counsel for Hewlett-Packard in Norway and Denmark. ‘Overseeing all legal aspects of the business, both contractual and regulatory’ is a challenging role for a sole lawyer. Roar Sæbø says that ‘as sole counsel, I am leveraging from outside counsel to the extent necessary for expertise in areas of law that I myself do not cover’. Roar Sæbø explains that ‘being a Norwegian lawyer, it adds a layer of complexity when I am also overseeing the legal aspects of the Danish business, as Danish laws are quite different within many important areas, such as labor relations, data privacy, intellectual property and public procurement’. Roar Sæbø works extremely hard in order to enable the sales force to self-support in many aspects, since this reduces the need for legal support in individual sales pursuits. ‘I have streamlined the business processes, for example, by ensuring that more of the revenue is generated on HP standard terms and conditions, reducing the need to negotiate new and transaction specific terms and conditions’. Training the sales staff in fundamental contract law has also enabled the sales resources to do a better job, which reduces the need for legal support. He was the local lead on the separation of Hewlett-Packard Company, as part of the global separation of the group. This project was being completed at the same time as he was taking responsibility as country counsel of Hewlett-Packard Enterprises Denmark. He says this was his toughest challenge of the past year: ‘we are proud that all project milestones for my region, without exception, were met with 100 % accuracy throughout the whole separation processes’. On the revenue generating side, Roar Sæbø believes that the most complex cases over the past year have been outsourcing negotiations, global frame agreement negotiations, and software dispute negotiations. He concedes that ‘the international aspects which are part of virtually all deals negotiated in HP, also make matters more demanding and interesting. Budgeting and cost reporting, especially for outside counsel, including cost reductions, have also been implemented’. In addition to his work at Hewlett-Packard, Roar Sæbø is a board member at the Norwegian Association for Computers and Law. He is also Editor in Chief of Lov&Data, a periodical publishing articles about law and technology, and he is chairman of the Norwegian Domain Name Dispute Resolution Board.