About

With approximately 160 lawyers spread across the globe, iconic Swedish vehicle manufacturer Volvo Group is served by an in-house legal team able to draw on a deep pool of legal talent, capable not only of dealing with all relevant laws and regulations, but the most complex commercial aspects of Volvo’s business. Executive vice president legal and compliance Sofia Frändberg is the most senior in-house lawyer of the Volvo Group, and she leads the Group’s legal and compliance function from her base in Gothenburg. She is also a member of the Volvo Group executive team, drawing in on almost 25 years of experience within the organisation. The structure of the function is decentralised, and each general counsel of Volvo’s different business areas and truck divisions are part of the management teams of their respective organisations, as well as having a functional reporting line to Frändberg. Also reporting directly to Frändberg are the head of the corporate legal team and the head of the corporate compliance team. The Volvo Group legal team is run with a clear sense of purpose, including a culture that identifies qualities that its members are expected to display at all times. These are proactivity, responsiveness, being business and results-oriented, maintaining integrity and independence, being team players and to create awareness of the legal function’s value-adding. Frändberg explains that this culture has ‘served us well for many years and will continue to do so onwards’. Well-prepared for future challenges and changes within the market, the team is getting to grips with new business models and new ways of working. As Frändberg explains, the team is ‘closely linked to the operations and the challenges of the business. The automotive industry is undergoing a large transformation, in terms of new technologies such as automation, electro mobility and connectivity changing the landscape. These disruptive trends will not only have an impact on Volvo’s operations, but will also have an impact on society as a whole. By consequence, the Volvo Group’s legal function is faced with and must address new legal challenges and risk assessments’. In addition to the challenges that come with being a high profile figure in the automotive industry, the team ‘continues to see an increased focus on digitalisation and compliance, of which data privacy, cyber security and right to data are very much on the radar’. In general, its operations are becoming more and more complex, due to an increased regulatory landscape in different areas, which poses new requirements and expectations on the competences and abilities of the legal function. In supporting the Group’s operations on a daily and strategic basis, an example of the team’s work includes the signing of an agreement with NVIDIA to jointly develop the decision making system of autonomous commercial vehicles and machines. This partnership will see Volvo utilise NVIDIA’s end-to-end artificial intelligence platform for training, simulation and in-vehicle computing, which Frändberg highlights will result in a system designed to ‘safely handle fully autonomous driving on public roads and highways’. It is also working on the development of a ‘flexible, scalable autonomous driving system, which is planned to be used first in commercial pilots and later in commercial offerings from the Volvo Group’. Contusing to assist Volvo in its push to rollout innovative initiatives such as this, the team has also worked on Volvo Trucks’ electric, connected and autonomous vehicle Vera, which will form ‘part of an integrated solution to transport goods from a logistics centre to a port terminal in Gothenburg’, as a result of a new collaboration between Volvo Trucks and the ferry and logistics company DFDS.