About

Senior vice president legal and compliance Frode Strømø heads up the global legal and compliance team at Norwegian oil services company Aker Solutions. As Strømø explains, the global team contains ‘36 lawyers and three non-lawyers [with] 24 Norwegian based team members, forming a sizable in-house team by Norwegian standards’ in addition to a global compliance team made up of two lawyers and six non-lawyers. The team, which Strømø states has ‘earned a solid reputation in the country’s legal community’ is setup as a truly global function covering ‘all areas’ of Aker Solutions business activities. Expert legal advice is dispersed throughout the company via individual heads of legal present within different business units; the five Aker Solutions delivery centres, the corporate function and the COO function at the company each have one head of legal in the respective management teams. Strømø explains this organisation further: ‘Legal resources are provided to the heads of legal from local legal resource teams in Norway, UK, US, Brazil, India, Malaysia and Russia. The heads of legal as well as the directors of the local resource teams all report to me’. The team is equipped with comprehensive training in order to handle legal issues across ‘Aker Solutions’ offerings within engineering services, the various product segments and maintenance and modification services’, and such an approach ensures ‘flexibility and competency within the teams and across locations’ as well as providing ‘new challenges and variety for lawyers’. Very much a “hands on” function within the company, Aker Solutions legal team has undergone several changes within the recent past to evolve into the business-supporting and specialised team it currently is. Strømø highlights two in particular, first citing a re-structure undertaken in November 2016 to move away from a ‘fragmented structure with a corporate team and separate, decentralised legal teams for each business area’ and become ‘one integrated team working closely together across the entire business’. The other change is concerned with the impact of economic downturn in the oil and gas industry and increasing complexity and changes to these markets, he says ‘the legal team has worked intensively on becoming more commercially and technically minded in order to assess the actual risk of the business and to provide truly relevant advice. The new flexibility required has in turn made us more competent and brought us to a new level as a legal team and as business advisors’. Regarding the extensive nature of affairs that it covers, the team reviews all tenders in full detail, spanning from ‘short duration feasibility studies to billion dollar hardware deliveries involving incorporated joint ventures in remote jurisdictions’. In addition to contract negotiations, the team’s daily scenarios also include advice related to project support, new country-entries with local establishment, regulatory requirements, general corporate matters, M&A and securities law. Aker Solutions legal team’s ethos is described as providing ‘highly qualified legal expertise and strong business acumen living side by side in a culture of knowledge sharing and positive energy’.