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

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. I was. How did you ...