About

What are the most important transactions and litigations that you have been involved in during the last two years?

At Tetra Pak, we have a proactive approach to business and our team’s priority is to provide timely and efficient practical legal advice to business in order to achieve our goals in serving customers and develop our markets. In that respect, we have significantly updated our sales and services contracts not only for our standard business but to cover new developed sales models and innovations also covering digitalization and created practical negotiation/revision/approval tools in order to efficiently analyse and finalize contracts in an effective manner.  

What have been the major external trends that have impacted your team’s work over the past two years (market developments, changing regulatory environment, political events etc.)?

Data privacy laws and digitalisation initiatives, as well as new ways of doing business have been our priorities in order to help our business colleagues to better serve Tetra Pak customers.

What will be the main focus for the company in the next 12 months and how do you intend to assist with this?

Continuous improvement in our quality and food safety as well as sustainability will be our focus as always.

What techniques do you use to provide commercially-focused and optimal business advice to your company? If so, how do you get these across to more junior lawyers in the team?

In my team, regardless of seniority levels, we treat each other as colleagues who have different experiences and points of view as well as different capabilities which complete each other in order to better serve our customers, internal and external. We have weekly informal calls where we freely share our agenda, priorities for the week, share experiences for everyone to learn from and ask our questions to each other. We have an open communication to assist and support or backup each other as needed. When you always remember that our reason for existence is to help our business colleagues serve our customers better in every way, the team acts as one.

Does the team use any “legal tech” products and do you find them a helpful management device?

Yes, our function has implemented legal tech tools and we are working in various cross cluster and functional teams. I am leading a knowledge management workgroup in establishing and modernising our databases and resources. The aim is to create simple to use and easy to find collection of knowledge and documents for all colleagues in every location.

In what ways do you see the in-house legal role in evolving in your region over the next few years?

In my opinion, globally oriented,technology savvy, well-rounded lawyers who can innovate in a proactive manner and can foresee legal issues of developments in business, will be crucial for in-house legal departments to be able to deliver fast, efficient legal advice which can make a difference in the eyes of the clients. In-house lawyers are required to take their skills and experience to a global approach, by obtaining new insights and perspectives that allow them to achieve success or solve business problems effectively and efficiently. The ability and skills to be able to analyse legal issues with reference to applicable local and international laws in order to deliver solution with a global applicability is key. In that way, if these solutions can be databased and used in similar situations, lawyers can use their creativity and work for new types of issues rather than repeating the same work elsewhere.

FOCUS ON: The future

The in-house legal function evolvement in the next decade.

The world has never been more interconnected than it is now, and with all fast and multiple changes happening in global business environment, I believe the legal profession is at an interesting turning point.

The way the business has sped up over the past five years [means it is] so different from before. More and more companies prefer to work with in-house counsel rather than law firms for many reasons but keeping up with business speed is becoming one of the major ones.

However, this brings additional development needs to in-house lawyers and requires different skill sets than in the past. High quality legal work now is a given basic requirement which is a pre-requisite of being a successful in-house legal department.

Technology has completely transformed every sector. In order to keep up with these innovations in a legal context, the lawyers need to develop an international, multi-skill sets on a global scale on top of the basic legal service success criteria. Sophisticated, globally oriented, technology savvy, well-rounded lawyers that will make valuable contributions in organisations are in high demand. In the next few years, speed, efficiency, practicality and delivering for the exact complex business need of the clients will be the key success criteria for in-house counsels and legal departments.

Leading and managing in-house legal teams, and being corporate citizen in multinationals for the last 21 years, I believe having an international and cross border mindset, being prepared to tackle multijurisdictional issues and analysing complex business issues with a broad, international and futuristic mindset will be the crucial skill set needed for legal professionals in the next decade. This requires innovation and staying updated on all areas surrounding legal practice to understand  many forces at play in the legal world also by looking at diverse fields of law directly involved in international business.