What has been the number one challenge that has impacted you over the past year?

A key challenge we are facing as a legal function is to ensure efficient business partnering to achieve positive business impact while managing risks in an ever-fast evolving – and strongly growing – business and an increasingly complex external environment. The growing internal and external demands on the Legal function made us initiate an exercise to establish a plan for our function’s development and growth over the next three years to achieve Legal Enabling Excellence by the end of 2025. The project is based on the following six pillars, under which we will take concrete action during each of the years 2023/2025: (i) Processes relating to strategy and priorities setting, risk management and value delivery based on business strategy and needs; (ii) legal function structure, competencies and delivery model; (iii) resourcing (internal and external) for maximum legal function efficiency; (iv) use of digital tools and knowledge management; (v) people development; (vi) legal function performance measurement (including KPI tracking) and communication.

At the same time, we recruited a legal function chief of staff and operations manager with a background in engineering and business chief of staff roles to lead the deployment of the plan and new model.

Could you share an example of a time when you came up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works and did not come at a large expense?

A key theme in my leadership of the Verisure legal function over the past nearly five years has been to constantly push for increased leveraging and connectedness between our Group and country legal team members, to enable growth, development and moves within the function and to create agile CoEs or networks between the group and country legal teams for crucial competence areas. This has resulted in a coherent, consistently delivering and engaged team with very high sustainable engagement scores year after year. In line with our Verisure mission, we have also made diversity and inclusion a priority, and the legal function is at all levels strong in gender and other diversity, with a close to perfect gender balance on the legal function management team and over 20 nationalities and four continents represented across our broader team. While this is not a one-off innovative idea, it is the idea that has achieved the most impact without coming at a considerable expense.

What would you say are the unique qualities required to be successful as an in-house lawyer in your industry?

Verisure is the leading provider of professionally monitored alarms for European households and small businesses. We operate in 17 countries across Europe and Latin America, with a team of over 25,000 members. Verisure has experienced exceptional double-digit growth over the past several years resulting from continuous product and service innovation, high service quality, a sophisticated go-to-market model and regular organic expansion into new countries, all enabled by a solid common DNA and culture. Essential qualities to succeed as a lawyer in this fast-moving, technology-enabled, human-delivered consumer services are strategic business thinking, agility, solution orientation and the ability to thrive in a high-paced environment.