About

Headquartered in Norway, DNV GL is a global quality assurance and risk management company structured into five business areas: maritime, oil and gas, energy, digital solutions and business assurance. Comprised of five lawyers, the legal team – including head of group legal for the Middle East and Asia Pacific (MEAPAC) Dag Ove Solsvik – supports all of these areas as well as group functions and global shared services across 24 countries in the region. Legal counsel Zack Quek supports Solsvik in Singapore whilst the other members are either based in Shanghai or Dubai. On the Singapore-based counsel, one nominator said, ‘Dag Ove and Zack Quek are responsible for DNV’s legal requirements from the Middle East, through Asia to Australia, a huge spectrum of legal systems and traditions. They manage to keep on top of all the disparate legal issues and manage them extremely efficiently. They also form an effective bridge between the business groups and the external legal advisers in dispute matters’. To manage the extensive workload of the team, Solsvik says they have adopted an ‘agile and dynamic model structured around parameters such as key client management and sharing workload amongst ourselves in regular meetings’. Adding, ‘I believe this gives the individual lawyers freedom and growth opportunities that are motivating and gives them challenges within all of DNV GLs business at the same time as the regular meetings has been key to developing a strong team spirit’. One of the most significant activities members of the team have been involved in recently is consolidating the 2013 merger between DNV and GL. As Solsvik explains, ‘post-merger, DNV GL operated over 100 entities in MEAPAC. In the last two years, legal has planned, executed and managed more than 50 mergers, business transfers and other corporate transactions, which consolidated our business operations into one or two entities per country’. Other notable activities of the team include supporting initiatives related to external acquisitions and divestures (with deal values between US$300m and US$400m), planning and executing a smart bidding and contracting project to improve the efficiency of contract handling within the oil and gas division as well as a complex global tender to appoint the company’s global partner law firms. The team has also been recognised for achieving favourable outcomes relating to breach of confidentiality and forgery cases in in Australia, Indonesia, Singapore and South Korea. Another nominator glowingly said of the team that, ‘I have been working with the DNV GL in-house team for a while and found them to be extremely professional and shrewd judges of business opportunities for their colleagues. They are able to get the right balance between accurate legal advice and commerciality which serves their colleagues well and has led to a number of good outcomes on projects where we have worked together. They are bright, talented, focussed and a pleasure to work with’.