About

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

The main focus of the company in next 12 months is data, and as the company data protection officer I am at the heart of this focus. So this year is my year. With the participation of all business units we are beginning a data governance project, which will include regulatory change management, a policy portal, contract management, third party management, data discovery, data lifecycle management archiving, data disposal and more.

How do you suggest in-house lawyers build strong relationships with business partners?

As an in-house lawyer you have to be a team player, so you always have to exist in the middle of the business and support the business, [be a] game changer and [consider] clever options and the plans you need to serve. Some tools include:

• Existing stakeholder plans
• Cross functional teams we have; we are leading with the help of business or we participate as a supporter
• Trainings
• Short videos
• Legal Hand Book for Executives Project (Competition law, Labour Law….) – Main Legal Issues Short Check Lists à what to do and what to avoid and when to need  a lawyer to ask

What “legal tech” products do you currently utilise, and do you foresee implementing more of these in the near future?

We are using programmes to follow up litigation that is integrated with the national court system, to measure the performance of external lawyers, agreements and whole correspondence archiving. I personally focus on digitalisation to serve to the upper management, [including] analysis of the team’s performance and results and to be in line with the company’s clean desk policy.