About

The legal team of Kvaerner, a global specialised engineering, procurement and construction company, is rightly recognised as among the most outstanding and innovative in Norway thanks to a four-strong team of expert business-savvy lawyers that make up the department. Henrik Inadomi is the most senior lawyer at the company, holding the position of senior vice president corporate support and general counsel, and leads a legal team that also collaborates constantly with an additional five lawyers working in Kvaerner’s contracts department. The team’s structure, Inadomi explains, is made up of individual lawyers with ‘different responsibilities in the project, depending upon specialities and interests’. Inadomi himself oversees all legal and compliance work and is secretary to the board of directors, also taking on operational management tasks within the company such as following up selected business development processes, tenders, projects and strategic tasks. The department’s expertise and depth is also shown through the department’s “second in command” Erlend Dahl, whose responsibilities include ‘following up tenders and contract management in projects [and] a special responsibility for partnering agreements, he is [also] the department’s specialist for handling compliance processes’. Ane McIver Oigard follows up selected tenders and contract management in projects and handles the IPR workstreams within the department, having also ‘handled selected processes against the Norwegian authorities’, while Signe Kongestol is responsible for supporting Kvaerner’s procurement work streams and handles the company secretariat, monitoring ‘formal corporate governance for the Kvaerner group of companies, follows up stock exchange regulations, and manages Kvaerner’s governing documents [and] responsibility for following up privacy regulation (GDPR)’. Supporting these professionals is Simona Stromme, the department’s ‘administrative mastermind’. The current makeup of the department has come after some reorganisation, as Inadomi explains – ‘as an oil service company, Kvaerner has been hit hard by the recent downturn [which] led to a resizing of the department from six to four lawyers’ – forcing a reallocation of tasks within the department and a realignment of compliance workstreams to integrate them more closely into legal workstreams. Where the department has perhaps most excelled is through its handling of what Inadomi calls ‘several complex litigation cases’, including one in the US that saw claims and counterclaims ‘well in excess of US$100s of millions, and which contained significant exposure for Kvaerner as a company’, was a ‘complex multi-party arbitration process, spanning six years’ and involved a number of parties. Inadomi explains the impact of the case and the legal department’s input as follows: ‘The legal department devised the case management strategy. Through strong teamwork, and close cooperation with our external counsel, Kvaerner’s outcome in this case significantly exceeded expectations of both our management and our board of directors. The total recovery exceeds US$125m by a not insignificant margin. Moreover, given that the Kvaerner group has maintained a commercial presence in Russia, the legal department has assisted with understanding the complex and rapidly developing trade restrictions regulations in the US, Europe and Norway, which has enabled the line organisation to take prudent commercial decisions regarding these operations’. In addition to significant successes on behalf of the Kvaerner business such as these, the team’s culture of ‘creating value through hands-on, proactive and high quality legal support to Kvaerner’s tendering and contracting management processes’, draws on a mandate expressed during the company’s formative stages in 2011, to ‘act as internal change agents for a more proactive and risk-based contract management in Kvaerner’. Inadomi’s leadership has seen the team become an integral and proactive part of management of our ongoing projects, working work closely with project management to identify legal and contractual risks at an earlier stage, and then defining strategic responses to optimise the company’s position contributing to ‘value creation [and] risk reduction for the company’.