About

Sweco is Europe’s leading engineering and architecture consultancy with approximately 16,000 employees across 14 countries and about SEK18.7bn (€1.8bn) in annual sales. Listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange, the company carries out projects in 70 countries throughout the world. Heading the legal and compliance function at Sweco, Lisa Lagerwall joined the company first as a corporate counsel in 2006, and has been general counsel since 2011. Sweco’s legal department has 40 corporate counsel and paralegals in different legal divisions. Group legal is a division handling legal matters for the entire group and consists of the general counsel, the compliance officer, the group privacy officer, three corporate counsel and one assistant. There are also local legal teams responsible for each business area. Head of legal for Sweden is Caroline Lindgren, who currently has two corporate counsel reporting to her. With constant growth of Sweco, the legal department has added five corporate counsel as well as increased legal support with paralegals and assistants during the past two years. The team has also introduced software support such as EthiXbase within compliance. ‘During this period we appointed Barend van den Bos, corporate counsel in the Netherlands, as group privacy officer. He now has a network of local privacy officers in each business area working with him on privacy matters’, says Lagerwall. Recently the legal department has been involved in a number of significant deals, including the acquisition of IMP in Germany and the acquisition of MLM in the UK. In addition, the legal department developed a crucial business partner programme when providing projects worldwide with local consultancy firms as subcontractors. ‘We train them, have them sign on to our code of conduct but also in various ways try to convey the message of how we do business. This business partner programme is subject to constant development but in the last two years we have focused intensely on securing that we are getting the message through’, Lagerwall explains. Talking about the ethos of the team, Lagerwall states that the team culture ‘is very much the same as the culture for of the rest of the business. We are approachable and committed with recognised expertise. The engineers, architects and environmental experts working within Sweco recognise us as a part of business. Within the legal team, there is a strong collaborative spirit. We help each other out. At the next legal summit in September, all corporate counsel, privacy officers and compliance officers will meet to discuss matters relating to best practice, our respective roles and how to best collaborate in various matters’.