About

What are the most important transactions and litigations that you have been involved in during the last two years?

With effect from October 2018, Nord Pool completed an extensive group-internal reorganisation, and through a demerger divided its business by moving its customer-facing power exchange activities into a group company (Nord Pool AS) separate from the group company which handles all activities related to European market coupling (European Market Coupling Operator AS). I headed the legal side of the project, chaired and coordinated all the needed internal processes, acted as the main legal advisor of our management team, represented in the meetings with our owners, the Nordic transmission system operators, and coordinated the external legal advisors. Following the group-internal reorganisation, our owners started the process to find a potential purchaser for the power exchange business. I have been intensely involved in preparing the sales documentation in close cooperation with our external legal advisors. The process is still ongoing.

The project, which involved all European transmission system operators, power exchanges and national regulatory authorities, as well as the Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER) and the European Commission, started with the entering into force of the Commission Regulation (EU) 2015/1222 establishing a Guideline on Capacity Allocation and Congestion Management (CACM-Regulation) on 14 August 2015. It reached important milestones of completion with the go-live of Single Intraday Market Coupling on 12 June 2018, and Single Day-Ahead Market Coupling on 2 July 2019. I have been involved in the project from the beginning, representing our interests in negotiations starting from top (negotiations with the European Commission) down to the national level (negotiations with individual transmission system operators and competing power exchanges in addition to interaction with national regulatory authorities).

How do you juggle your different roles – market surveillance team, regulatory affairs and human resources compliance roles – and being a general counsel?

Being very structured and always being very diligent on prioritising the various matters, I need to focus on and be involved in relying on strict time management and flexible working hours. Having great teams of highly skilled employees in each of the three areas, who are used to working fairly autonomously and pro-actively dealing with day-to-day-issues coming along, and who only involve me in issues which are very critical for the business, or require management input or decisions. Being able to make use of excellent IT infrastructure within the company, which allows working remotely. The company provides the latest technology in terms of cloud computing, video conferencing and soft and hardware. Our very helpful IT staff is always within a phone call’s reach and ready to help in case of any problems.

In what ways do you see the in-house legal role evolving in your region over the next few years?

With increasing internationalisation of the business, the focus is shifting from managing teams which are physically present in one location to managing and coordinating the work from employees, who travel, work from different locations or from home. The in-house legal role is less defined by supervision, but more by coordination and ensuring coherence by defining and communicating a common strategy and the company’s positions in various matters. Being flexible to travel and to coordinate physical meetings outside the company’s headquarter in locations where staff is based or meets becomes ever more important. In our industry there is increased flexibility both on the legal and political side of the business and also related to understanding the market and its players so the expertise of the in-house legal counsel will be more and more important.

What would you say are the unique qualities required to be successful as an in-house lawyer in your industry?

The energy industry is currently undergoing massive shifts due to the increasing importance of renewable generation, which requires the re-thinking of old patterns and behaviours from all stakeholders. In addition, like all industries, the energy industry needs to adapt to ever faster digitalisation, automation, internationalisation and interconnectivity. The in-house lawyer of the past, who is only exposed to one jurisdiction and is able to do his or her job by recycling tried and tested contract templates from many years ago, is an outdated model. Today, in order to add value to the business, the in-house lawyer needs to be flexible and adaptive in thinking of the best legal solutions for the business, needs to be “fluent” in negotiating with counterparts coming from many different cultural backgrounds, needs to have a basic understanding of other legal systems, and needs to understand how to make the best use of modern means of communications without exposing the company to undue risks from document data leaks or loss. In addition to this the in-house lawyer also needs to understand the politics in our business and have strong regulatory skills in addition to the more traditional legal qualifications.

Have any new laws, regulations or judicial decisions greatly impacted your company’s business or your legal practice? Given your multi-national team, how do you manage the different local contexts?

The entry into force of the CACM-Regulation in 2015 made a huge shift to our industry and laid the ground for the opening of the Single Intraday Market Coupling and the Single Day-ahead Market Coupling across Europe. With our reorganisation, we pro-actively brought our business a big step towards what we strongly believe should be the set-up that should be enshrined in European law: the monopolistic market coupling operation should be fully separated (unbundled) from the competitive power exchange activities. Only this set-up avoids the conflicts of interest and their negative effects on the implementation and operation of European market coupling, which we have experienced since the entry into force of the CACM-Regulation in 2015. We are currently in intensive discussions with the European Commission, the national regulatory authorities, and other stakeholders across Europe to create awareness of the need to reform the CACM-Regulation and urge them to implement the aforementioned principle of unbundling. In this respect, we hope that our company’s business and our legal practice can impact European law and regulation, rather than the other way around.