About

Headquartered in Helsinki, Stora Enso is a leading provider of renewable solutions in packaging, biomaterials, wood and paper. The company has four sub-functions in its internal legal department: IP, governance, ethics and compliance and legal services, and in his role of the company’s lead counsel for legal services, Christian Swartling heads the legal services sub-function. Swartling explains his leadership of ‘all group and division business legal support resources’, entailing 15 corporate lawyers plus ‘support staff and local lawyers to manage the outside counsel network’, and to serve as secretary of the group leadership team. The role means that he reports directly to the company’s executive vice present of legal, general counsel and country senior executive for Sweden – Per Lyrvall. Swartling’s important function within the business was bestowed to him thanks to his outstanding experience to date; he spent almost nine years in private practice working on cross-border transactions, and moved in-house in 2007 to become legal director and the senior leadership team member for GE Capital, Nordics on the commercial finance side. Here he was involved during the ‘intense restructuring of the Nordic GE Capital business in the midst of the financial crisis’ proving his ability to produce results under pressure in adverse circumstances. Swartling first joined Stora Enso in 2010 as a legal counsel supporting the renewable packaging division, before being promoted to lead counsel involving leadership of the legal function of the division in 2012 as well as a place on the division’s management team. In 2015 he was appointed to his current role. Due to a structural global decline in paper demand, Swartling explains that Stora Enso is operating within the context of a market that has ‘required the company to rethink its business and to shift capital and focus to segments and geographies that are growing’. Swartling and the wider legal services department have a huge role to play in this, providing ‘proactive and trusted’ advice on topics such as M&A activity, green field investments with engineered financing, joint venture and equipment sale documentation, and closures and redundancies. Crucial to future business plans, Swartling’s work accompanies the strategy to renovating Stora Enso’s product portfolio with hopes to ‘double its sales from new products and services’. Swartling’s role is to ensure the team is well-placed to perform ‘contract protection and partnership alignment as it relates to the commercial models, IP and secrecy issues’. Swartling has close contact with key decision makers, meeting the CEO and EVPs on a monthly basis, giving him ‘an in depth understanding of the direction of the group’ allowing him to ‘allocate the legal resources to mitigate risk and leverage on opportunities accordingly’. Speaking about changes he has made to the department, Swartling first chose to ‘align a diverse and scattered team around a common strategy, focus areas and action plan with measurable targets’. This included ‘regular meetings, sharing best practices, joint trainings [and more]’ with working principles that ‘ensure clarity of the legal counsel’s role as it relates to working with the business (including proactivity, compliance and commercial risk taking, delivery expectations)’. Further proving his foresight and adaptability, he has recently focused on testing, using and implementing‘“work smart” processes in order to use in-house resources more efficiently. As an example, we are now testing artificial intelligence for the initial contract review in our contract review process, in a ground-breaking proof of concept project that will conclude in the last quarter of this year’.