About

DKSH relies on its 16 legal professionals and five assistants to support its market expansion services. The legal team has undergone a few critical changes that have enabled a more harmonious and efficient working method. The general counsel role has been newly created, directly reporting to the CEO and leading all legal matters throughout the group, underscoring the importance of the legal function for DKSH. The department is also locally represented in more countries than in the past and has been successfully involved in a very broad range of activities. Despite restricted resources, the DKSH legal team manages to provide timely and effective support in all matters, supporting the service that DKSH provides to over 5,000 clients. Every year, approximately 2,500 contracts are concluded or renewed and checked by the legal department. General counsel and corporate secretary Laurent Sigismondi states that ‘the most important contribution of the legal team is to ensure that the business is optimally protected in terms of legal risks in the most cost-efficient manner possible’, including comprehensive due diligence on contracts. A very concrete example of this is the development of a contract database that not only serves as an archive for all our commercial contracts, but also allows the team to operate a tight contract management control. The team is also in the midst of developing clear legal standards for each of the typical clauses of each standard type of contracts. ‘Given the complexity of our various business models, this is a very challenging task’, says Sigismondi. The next steps will also include the development of “playbooks” to guide and support business negotiations in a simple and straightforward manner. Given the current regulatory environment and DKSH’s rapid growth and development as a Swiss-listed company, the need for legal advice is subsequently increasing as well. The team addresses this challenge by pooling the internal resources and facilitating the internal transfer of “know-how” to non-legal colleagues.