About

Best known as the creators of the Angry Birds franchise, global entertainment media company Rovio Entertainment is served by a dynamic and effective legal team headed by Minna Raitanen, general counsel and secretary of the board of directors. The team is made up of six lawyers and two non-lawyers, and is constantly striving to secure the best results for Rovio in an environment of creative people in a constantly changing digital environment with innovate media products and solutions. Heavily involved in the products and services Rovio provide from planning to creation, a keen awareness of regulation is needed, the most evident of which is data protection and privacy on a global scale. All support for this is internalised within the business, and this integration between legal and the company’s products manifests itself in various ways, such as organising a company-wide assessment to evaluate every business unit with respect to the effect of new privacy legalisation EU-USA data transfer revolution and COPPA in the USA. Additionally, the innovation of Rovio’s legal team can be displayed through their creation of a simplified, online e-learning tool using Angry Bird characters as illustrations, which Raitanen says worked ‘very well in comparison to the traditional legal trainings’; embracing the company’s own creativity allowed the lawyers to communicate with the wider business more effectively. To ensure that Angry Birds brand has been a success across gaming platforms, merchandise and film, the legal team at Rovio has had to be vigilant on intellectual property (IP) and trademark protection, now boasting some of the most impressive IP lawyers in Finland. In terms of external factors, the nature of the company’s work mean there is hardly any area of the law that doesn’t impact the business, however Raitanen cites the ‘fragmenting and changing nature’ of regulation worldwide being a particular challenge, as well as the disparity between resources and the ‘very complex product and services offerings we have in our business units’.