Episode 25: Becoming a trusted partner - with Thomas Christiansen, GC at TrackUnit

Inspiring Legal

TrackUnit's General Counsel, Thomas Christiansen, joins the Inspiring Legal studio! We're talking about being the first Legal hire, how to educate the rest of the business, how to help Sales, and how being agile in a small company helps you get ahead.

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Full episode transcript:

[00:00 - 00:16] Welcome to Inspiring Legal, the podcast for in-house legal. Get insights, learn from peers, life lessons from some of the most influential GCs.
[00:16 - 00:34] If it's related to in-house legal, we cover it. For more inspiration, go to Openli.com slash community. Welcome to this episode of Inspiring Legal.
[00:34 - 00:51] My name is Stine and I'm a part of Openli. And today I'm going to be joined by Thomas Christensen, who is going to introduce himself in a second. But before he does that, I can just already now give you a sneak little kind of advertiser as to what we're going to be talking about today.
[00:51 - 01:11] Because Thomas has been on a journey with the company Track Unit. And that has been quite the impressive journey going for, well, growing across many countries. On top of that, growing himself, being the first one in legal and how that has impacted the culture.
[01:11 - 01:31] Well, that's what we're going to be talking about today. Welcome, Thomas. Thank you, Stine. Nice to join you. Well, it's us thanking you for being here. Thomas, I know a little bit about you and your company, but the listeners might not. So maybe could you give an introduction to who you are and your background.
[01:31 - 01:47] And maybe also Track Unit, just so that people get to know a little bit more. Oh, yeah, for sure. So, yes, and yeah, you're correct. I was the first legal in Track Unit. I have a background first from corporate law. So, well, in Denmark, we have a split.
[01:47 - 02:03] You have corporate law and ordinary law. So my first education was a candidacy in our masters in corporate law. I did do a normal law, so to speak, afterwards. So I have both. And that's my educational background.
[02:03 - 02:20] And I've had a little bit of a diverse kind of career to go into it. I actually started working for a university as a kind of a, what is it, department head at an administrative level for a center. Working with teleinfrastructure, which is suddenly where I ended up afterwards also.
[02:20 - 02:36] But that was not the trajectory I was set out to be. So I left them after three years working into a company that was a bit of a startup working within, well, a lot of legal work, mostly focused on employment law. That was bought by a union, a Danish union called Krifa.
[02:36 - 02:56] And then I worked for them for about three years after they bought and merged it into their organization. So I learned a lot about employment law there. Didn't really feel that that was my plan for my future. So I heard about a small Danish company that was just been acquired by Goldman Sachs and Grow Capital at that point.
[02:56 - 03:12] And that sounded very interesting to kind of move out and be in an in-house legal. So I started there in May 16, I believe it was, which is a long time ago for most people. But yes, so that was my kind of introduction into the work in track unit.
[03:12 - 03:29] Track unit is a company that does fleet management. We are a software company, have a hardware component as well, enables us to collect data, have roughly about one and a half million units deployed all over the world, collecting data in construction.
[03:29 - 03:49] So it is the construction world that is our main focus. So we call it off highway. And our purpose in the entire company is actually to eliminate downtime, which is one of the biggest issues for our industry. And plays a lot into the legal over, by the way, we like to optimize, we like to be efficient, we like to make things in the best possible way.
[03:49 - 04:05] And it's a not so digitized world that we are trying to help digitize and actually make use of data. And as we also spoke a little bit before the podcast, as well, being open about data and what you can use it for to help pretty much the industry. And we see a lot of traction in that.
[04:05 - 04:30] Recently been acquired by HG Capital, so Goldman Sachs. So the PE journey, private equity journey is also part of, let me say, my internal education, so to speak. It has been quite a journey going from a, let's say, a normal eight to four job to be owned by a big conglomerate PE bank that has some requirements, not just on the legal side, but also the compliance side.
[04:30 - 04:46] So it has been a how to build this structure in a, let's call it a small North Jutland company, maybe not used to too much legal. And well, trying to see how you actually gain a role of being a trusted partner as a legal person.
[04:46 - 05:04] So, Thomas, when you joined the company, you were their first legal hire. I was. How did you kind of go about educating the CEO and the CFO about, hey, I'm the new guy.
[05:04 - 05:20] I'm the one who helps with legal. And what does that even mean? So how did you do that? And what were your learnings from it? I would say I was a little bit naive when I started. I had like a big idea about now I have to build structure.
[05:20 - 05:37] I'm going to teach these people how to do legal, how to do everything in the right way. Very quickly, I learned software is definitely not a place where you build structure. It's where you need to be agile. So that's one of my big learnings. If you're in a company, and maybe even as the first one, I used to, well, I'm inspired by a few other legal people.
[05:37 - 05:58] So I call it building walls. I can't build boxes. I can build walls. And within those walls, they can pretty much pounce as they want. I'm just making sure we don't end up in places where we go to jail or get big fines or, well, get into media trouble or anything else. That's pretty much my main task is keeping us within these walls, both compliance and legal-wise.
[05:58 - 06:25] And I had to learn to forget about the boxes and just say, well, I'll keep us in line, but I'll help kind of impact the business on the best possible way. And I think the journey is mainly, well, all the legal business will know that we have a tendency to be always in a little bit of conflict with our salespeople because they see us, well, we are slow, we're a bottleneck.
[06:25 - 06:43] We do everything to kind of stop the commercial journey. And just convincing them, no, that's not what we're doing. It's actually enabling you to do things in a correct way. And I think, well, it took a few years, but I would say that our legal actually appreciate the legal department now.
[06:43 - 07:12] So sales help, legal help sales. But yes, educating everybody, including CEOs. I think from what I've heard from others, but also my own personal experience is that when you start as the first legal hire, it's a lot about not only building processes, but it's a lot about getting people to know what you can use legal for, how legal can support and be a business player.
[07:12 - 07:29] But at the same time, it's also a find balance in regards to you also need to build walls. You need to protect the business. So can you maybe just tell a little bit about how did you get started? Like, how did you go about that journey? Yeah, for sure.
[07:29 - 07:45] It's a, I'm a big fan of the book, The Trusted Advisor. It has a very good trust equation because w...