About

Peter Schøtt Knudsen has been working in-house for over 14 years, and is currently the vice president, general counsel and global head of legal and IPR for ECCO Holding in Denmark, a company specialising in shoe manufacturing. The team at ECCO is 15-strong, with 10 legal and five non-legal staff overseeing global legal affairs. Schøtt Knudsen jokingly recalls that ‘in the 80s maybe all the lawyers in Denmark could sit in a small office, but now you would need a football arena to fit us all in’. Over the years Schøtt Knudsen has had the chance to experience many policy changing events in the legal sector, taking the Oil-for-Food scandal as one example, where he played a crucial role with anti-piracy laws. He also created compliance programs to ensure that medication sales remained unharmed in the aftermath of the scandal. Since Schøtt Knudsen joined ECCO three years ago and ‘has transformed the department into a truly global unit’. He has achieved this by ensuring that legal pronouncements are unified with managerial decision making while also editing the global reporting line to have a more structural approach. The new shift in ECCO’s focus towards e-Commerce has brought in new ventures for Schøtt Knudsen and his team as they concentrate on consumer products, associate relations to consumers and personal data, all while they continue to tackle the constant challenges of compliance in a global setting. Given Schøtt Knudsen’s ‘unrivalled flair for business’, as quoted by a source from a leading external firm, both ECCO Holding and the legal team are in experienced hands. For his dedication and pivotal role of many years in the in-house sector Schøtt Knudsen more than merits appreciation and acknowledgements for his efforts: ‘I have been part of it from the beginning and it has been great to be a part of this journey’.