The Lead Counsel who believes in curiosity, stubbornness and a healthy bit of laziness

Bolagsjuristbloggen met with Swedish-Finnish industrial company Stora Enso’s Lead Counsel Christian Swartling to find out a bit more about him and his priorities for 2019.

Christian, you have a classic legal career, top tier law firm MSA, legal director at GE Capital and now leading legal services at Stora Enso. Tell us, what has been the main drivers in your career and what has brought you to where you are today?

I do not think that I have had a grand plan other than to do the job at hand to the best of my abilities. In retrospect, I think curiosity, stubbornness and a healthy bit of laziness have helped me throughout my career. Laziness helps you to try to find out more efficient ways of working. Since the inhouse legal resources are limited, you need to ensure that the time you spend gets the most possible impact. Additional man hours is not always the long term answer.

What are your personal goals for 2019?

Everyone in Stora Enso’s Legal function has the objective to enhance the company’s ethics and compliance culture from a great level to an even better. In addition, I will personally focus on how the legal function’s processes support and interface with the group’s core processes in order to align, develop and improve.

– What are your teams priorities for 2019?

Our focus areas are aligned with the Group strategy for example customers and innovation. Within those areas, the team is encouraged to implement work smart projects. A work smart project is essentially about finding a simpler way of handling matters. The end results could be that we handle matters with less manual touch, we get a more effective reach throughout the organization without additional legal resources, or a reduction of stress in the team. A work smart project can involve rethinking a process and using a tech tool as support, rolling out a training, or more a explorative use of new legal tech tools using for example AI etc.

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