About

DSV is a Danish transport and logistic company that provides air, sea, road and rail solutions to customers across several jurisdictions worldwide. Legal support to the company is headed by Peter Ring, who oversees a legal function with 13 lawyers and six non-lawyers, with further additions in the pipeline. Important work from the team is spread across several different transactions and decisions; perhaps most notable is the creation of a “Compliance Review Team” that provides a global centre of excellence regarding a myriad of business issues encompassing export control, vendor review, training, compliance audit and communication of compliances issues around the business. Group legal at DSV has faced noticeable recent growth, which has meant adding specialist lawyers to the team in Denmark and Poland to fill gaps in specific business unit’s knowledge areas, such as real estate. The team also experienced changes thanks to DSV’s 2016 acquisition of UTi in a $1.3bn US public transaction. In addition to the great many legal, regulatory and compliance related challenges posed, UTi’s lawyers have become an integral part of the DSV group legal team even in the face of a huge integration task (with approximately 150 legal entities spread across more than 58 countries). Ring highlights two other specific market developments that have challenged the team; new standards of freight forwarding conditions in the Nordic countries and new regulation on Market Abuse, which necessitated the team’s input with their commercial partners even more. Showing their organisation and pre-emptive way of working Ring claims that ‘DSV is well prepared for the changes and have all things in place for the implementation date’. Receiving the ‘buy-in’ of management on the aforementioned tasks, the team is trusted and held in confidence from the commercial arm of the business, a testament to what Ring calls the legal team’s ‘ability to meaningfully engage with, understand and support the business operations. And first and foremost it tells something about group legal’s added value. It has to be noted that the freight forwarding business is a low margin business, which requires DSV to be very conscious about costs’.