About

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

Over the last two years, I have been involved in and responsible for the legal assistance when closing large shipbuilding contracts for projects to be constructed at our shipyard, Ulstein Verft, as well as substantial contracts for supply of design and equipment packages from our design and engineering company, Ulstein Design & Solution, to external yards worldwide. I have also been involved in the negotiations with the main suppliers of products and services to the abovementioned projects. This includes Rolls-Royce Marine (now Kongsberg Maritime), Siemens, Wärtsila, TTS, ABB, Brunvoll, R&M, MacGregor, MAN, KONE, Pon Power, SMST, Uptime, Indar and Crist Shipyard.

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

As our region has been hit hard by the downturn in the offshore industry, the main challenge for the legal department is and will over the next few years basically be doing more for less. The legal department’s involvement in all levels of the business has substantially increased over the last years, and with limited resources available, we focus on standardisation of contracts and other templates, developing libraries of pre-approved contract amendments and in general raising the competence on relevant legal issues within the organisation by holding courses and work-shops.

Do you have any effective techniques for getting the most out of external counsel, in terms of how to instruct them?

First of all, we require external counsel to avoid lengthy legal memos, focus on the conclusion and provide clear advice. We also require that feedback on contracts and other legal documents are presented by way of tracked changes, preferably marked with “traffic lights” where the importance of the proposed amendment are marked with green, yellow or red (green means nice to have, yellow means important but not critical and red means critical or a deal breaker). This is in order to weigh the various proposed amendments and to ease the priority between the various items in the actual negotiations.

Looking forward, what technological advancements do you feel will impact the role of in-house legal teams in the future the most?

I believe that Artificial Intelligence, machine learning and the Internet of Things will challenge our traditional assessment of risks and liabilities and it will be interesting to see how this will develop. In our business, this will in particular be challenged when developing and operating autonomous ships.

What can law firms do to improve their services to the legal department?

I believe that operational experience is crucial in order to fully understand the client’s business and to be able to provide practical legal advice. Hence, I believe that trainee programs, internships and temporary external hire will improve the law firm’s service to the legal departments. Further, I believe that increased focus on diversity in law firms, in particular on partner level, will contribute to maintaining more of the best lawyers in the law firms and not mainly the lawyers with the most billable hours.

Thought Piece: A practical approach to compliance

One of the main challenges for legal departments is often how to meet growing demands without adding substantial costs. A leading factor in the growing demand for legal resources is steadily increasing compliance requirements. Stricter and far-reaching requirements from, amongst others, governments, financial institutions and customers over the last decade have led to substantially increased workload for companies of all sizes and companies spend an increasing proportion of their total operating costs on compliance.

In particular, extensive requirements, often going beyond mandatory laws, have increased the need for due diligence assessments, audits and follow-up in respect of an increasing number of participants in most projects, often in multiple layers of the contract chain. This is a time-consuming and costly process. The requirements involve, for example, assessments in relation to corruption, money-laundering, sanctions, human rights, labour rights and QHSE.

Compliance is undoubtedly important and ultimately benefits all parties. However, in order to make actual improvement to business practices, it needs to be possible to actually translate contractual requirements into actions. In other words, the requirements must be doable and not just lengthy theoretical undertakings. Unfortunately, when negotiating compliance clauses in contracts, I am often left with the impression that it can be less important to some whether the requirements are really capable of being met, as long as the ideal wording is in place. This leads one to wonder whether the real objective is being able to hold someone liable in the event of non-compliance somewhere in the contractual chain, rather than to encourage actual compliance.

A further observation is that many companies, and in particular suppliers of export goods, are the subjects of multiple, more or less identical, assessments each year. So, can compliance requirements be met through more efficient and less costly processes?

I strongly believe that it would be a win – win situation for all parties if assessments, audits and follow-up could be conducted by independent and reliable entities such as governmental bodies, classification societies or the like, and made publicly available by way of certifications, licenses, and approvals or similar. This would ensure consistently thorough assessments and provide more reliable results than today’s duplicative assessments, performed by parties with varying skill and experience, all of which are likely to lead to the same conclusions and all of which are confidential, preventing re-use by the next stakeholder.