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

04/25/23 • 30 min

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.

Thank you for listening to Inspiring Legal.

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...

Thank you for listening to Inspiring Legal.

Full episode transcript:

Previous Episode

Episode 24: The future of privacy

The privacy landscape is moving fast these days, and increasingly so. That's why we're dedicating the following weeks fully to privacy here at Inspiring Legal. Stine Tornmark will take you through what you need to know and what's on the horizon for digital privacy.

Thank you for listening to Inspiring Legal.

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 - 00:38] If it's related to in-house legal, we cover it. For more inspiration, go to Openli.com slash community. So welcome to another episode of Inspiring Legal.
[00:38 - 00:54] My name is Stine and I am a CEO and co-founder of Openli. But what I'm also is a passionate person when it comes to privacy. I strongly believe that privacy is a fundamental human right.
[00:54 - 01:12] And it's not to put myself on a pedestal, but it's just to say my life. It's as much online as it is offline. That's just the name of the game today. With chat DBT and what's going on now with AI, well, that's only going to increase.
[01:13 - 01:29] So in this little episode, I'm going to be talking about data. I'm going to be talking about transferring data from the EU to the US. It doesn't sound super interesting, but I'm sorry to say it's impacting
[01:29 - 01:45] you and your life every single day. You might not be on Facebook, you might not use Google, but you will most likely either use Instagram, you might use Apple.
[01:45 - 02:05] Well, they're all US-based companies. So when I'm talking about data and I'm talking about data transfers, I'm talking about your everyday life because American tech companies are de facto in our lives and that isn't necessarily a bad thing, but take a step back.
[02:05 - 02:26] What is it that I'm really talking about? Well, in the EU, we have GDPR, right? We see it as a fundamental human right. The right for you to own your data. In the US, up until now, the focus has been very much about the companies owning data.
[02:27 - 02:46] We're seeing more legislation coming from the US, for example, in California with the CCPA, but we don't have the same standards yet anyway. What we're also seeing is a very strong intelligence agency in the US that have
[02:46 - 03:06] far-reaching rights to access your data, to use it in whatever way that they deem appropriate or not appropriate, but for whatever means they want the data. So therefore, there has been a lot of decisions over the last couple of years
[03:06 - 03:25] with Strems 2, if you've heard about that, the privacy shield falling apart, and all due to the fact that the US didn't provide the same level of protection. So what we then got was a period of time where everybody was running around
[03:26 - 03:41] and not knowing what to do. Then we got the SECs, that's the transfer mechanism enabling businesses to send data between the EU and the US, but that in itself isn't enough. You need to have additional safety measures.
[03:41 - 04:01] You need to make sure that your data is safe. So many kind of thought, okay, let's try and see if we can figure that one out. Not easy in any way. And I'm not promoting the only service, but that is a part of what it is that we're doing, trying to really help with that transfers element, as many of
[04:01 - 04:18] the things we're doing. But what we then saw is Google Analytics getting in trouble. It started in Austria. And what happened was that the Austrian data protection authorities found that there wasn't additional, the safety wasn't good enough.
[04:18 - 04:37] Transfers of data was happening, IP addresses and so forth in clear text. Big issue. Therefore, they kind of like said, Google Analytics violating GDPR, therefore, you can't use it. We then saw that the EU was also doing a lot of things that were not
[04:37 - 04:54] you can't use it. We then saw that spreading out. Moving to Italy, moving to France, moving to Denmark and the EDPB, that's the European Data Protection Board, issued a statement saying, this is an issue.
[04:55 - 05:15] So everybody started looking at, okay, I need to change. I need to find an alternative to Google Analytics. That's an episode we could take kind of like on its own, I know, but let's just focus on the transfers for today. So everybody, I think many were thinking, okay, we'll get a solution from the
[05:15 - 05:32] politicians. They will figure out a way for us to send data. They will create a framework and we're still waiting for that because the Biden administration came out not that long ago and saying, well, we're getting closer. We're going to get some kind of transfer in place.
[05:33 - 05:49] What Mark Schrems did, and that's the Austrian data protection, let's call it, I don't know what to call him. He is not an activist, but he's also, they're kind of like a non-profit
[05:49 - ...