About

Åsa Thunman is the executive vice president and general counsel of Sandvik Group, an engineering company based in Stockholm with a 2015 revenue figure of SEK 90.8bn ($10.6bn). Comprising around 120 staff, the group legal team has a mixture of qualified legal professionals working alongside patent engineers and attorneys, compliance professionals, sustainability experts and risk management personnel. In the face of a significant turnover of key stakeholders and organisational changes, along with market changes that Thunman calls ‘significant’, the Sandvik legal team still manage to provide support through its excellent work on key processes around governance and compliance. Experiencing upheaval in the team’s structure too – it moved from a centralised approach to a de-centralised model very recently – the team still successfully created key processes and priorities, all the while managing to upgrade the compliance and sustainability agenda as well as central governance principles. Guiding the company through pieces of work that include a new code of conduct and group sustainability strategy demonstrates the competency and effectiveness of the team’s work.