About

Tele2 is the second largest Swedish telecom operator, operating under the Tele2 and Comviq brands, and after the acquisition of TDC Sweden also offers full service, integrated B2B communication solutions. Victoria Swedjemark – the head of legal, regulatory and security for the company – cites being invited on to the management team of the company as furthering her knowledge and leadership capabilities; as it was then which allowed her to ‘truly understand [the] business model, operating model and key success factors’ for the company. Despite Tele2’s ‘small, tight’ legal team, it is imperative that Swedjemark organises and prioritises tasks and time that the team allocates. To do this, she starts with ‘understanding the business needs and what makes a difference to the success of the company’, and then ‘channelling our efforts to where it has most impact in accomplishing business results’. Noting the ‘proactivity, planning and discipline this requires’, other key pillars of this ethos is to ensure ‘self service capabilities for the business, including know-how transfer for less complex or standardised tasks and for first line of defence regulatory compliance’. The distinction of roles and responsibilities as well as the definition of measurable KPIs is also important, and Swedjemark has instituted performance measurement in a “Client Index survey” where representative subsets of key internal customers are asked on how well they think the team delivers. This includes questions around what should be delivered to the business and how this is perceived while doing it. Sensing trends in the industry, she also is a strong believer in new legal concepts, stating her belief in ‘simplification and, increasingly, automation. We are already using smart contracting and e-signature and are looking into several other really interesting use cases’. Asked to name her in-house career highlights, Swedjemark notes the work she conducted in assisting Björn Borg on a counterfeiting case, which she claims ‘was probably the starting point of the return on investment thinking to addressing legal problems that I have now incorporated. These days I expect return in terms of measurable business value from my third party legal service providers for example’. Her ethos regarding team leadership is as follows: ‘The success of the legal function is very much dependent on the value you can create together, as a team. It is key to attract the right people to your team and make them want to stay and develop, by having them buy into the company’s and the team’s vision and business targets, by fuelling their engagement and by enabling individual growth as well as the willingness to prioritise continuous improvement of the work we do in the legal function’. Having begun her legal career within Swedish law firm Delphi in 1999, Swedjemark worked in private practice until 2005, before assuming the general counsel role at Tilgin until 2010. She was then appointed general counsel and sustainability director of Björn Borg between January 2011 and Feb 2017, before joining Tele2 in her current role in March 2017.