About

Representing the world’s largest provider of ground and cargo handling services in the aviation industry, the legal team at Swissport is made up of six lawyers, two insurance specialists and one personal assistant. Led by Dr Johannes Spindler, executive vice president, chief legal officer and company secretary, the team has embarked on changes focused on enlarged responsibilities, involving risk management and compliance. When discussing the single most impressive innovation that the legal team has created Spindler mentions ‘the risk mitigation issue tracker where we have a quarterly report to the executive board on identified risk mitigation actions, tracking, process and several internal standardisations’. The team has demonstrable impact on the success of the company with successful acquisitions, merger clearances and overseeing an ownership change from European private equity house to Chinese owners. Tasked with the multijurisdictional due diligence during the acquisition, Spindler says that a big challenge was the many requests triggered by external financing, several merger clearances, and Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) questions, all of which has to be handled with a reduced team. Despite these obstacles the team has gone above and beyond to avoid unnecessary cost and to improve outputs. The legal team retain a close relationship with the CEO and board of directors and calculate their value to the business according to tangible ‘annual highlights’ such as ‘do instead of buy’, cost savings, cost avoidance and cost improvements. Spindler summarises this as ‘several million per annum to the bottom line as a result, plus the “priceless” benefit of risk mitigation provided by legal’.