Greetings from Alumni: Henrik Hautamäki, Legal Director at Remedy Entertainment Plc

In the second part of this autumn’s Greetings from Alumni series, we interviewed our alumnus Henrik Hautamäki, who works as a legal director at Remedy Entertainment Plc. During his time at Hannes between the years of 2014 and 2021, Henrik worked in the positions of a trainee, associate, and senior associate.

Hi Henrik, how has your autumn started?

Hi to all my Hannes friends and colleagues! My autumn has started well — thanks for asking.

You work as a legal director at Remedy Entertainment Plc. Can you tell us a little bit about the company and your work and daily tasks?

Absolutely. So about Remedy: We are a Finnish publicly listed video game company known for AAA console and PC games such as Control, Alan Wake, and Max Payne.

We are currently developing five AAA games. AAA games refer to movie-like productions with bigger budgets than other types of games. We work with (in my opinion) the best companies in the industry: Epic Games, Rockstar Games, Tencent, 505 Games, and Smilegate. We employ over 320 people.

Our legal department comprises two full-time in-house lawyers (myself included) and a legal trainee, who works part time. Our scope is super broad: We work with all kinds of contracts and maintain our templates and corporate policies. We work with video game law and intellectual property rights: we license our IPs for different purposes, we maintain our trademark portfolio. We work with financial reports, stock exchange releases, press releases, and insider issues. Topics on our plate also include GDPR issues, HR legal issues, remuneration & option plans, risk management, and general compliance.

Most of our work happens over Slack: We are basically a Slack-based legal helpdesk. We also attend a lot of calls daily and talk to all our teams from management to IT. We arrange legal trainings and develop legal processes. 

What would you say are the biggest differences between working as an in-house lawyer and working as a lawyer in a law firm?

I think there are many similarities and many differences.

One difference is that in an in-house job, you work with all kinds of people and most of them do not have a legal background. There is a lot of information in a company, and departments approach issues from their own perspective. To exaggerate a bit, legal looks at issues from a legal perspective, comms from a PR perspective, finance from a numbers perspective, IR from investors’ perspective, and so on.

As an in-house lawyer, to get your point through to the other side, you really need to focus on communicating your issues as clearly as possible. For most situations, a good rule of thumb is that you need to put your message into a package that a 5 year old would understand. At the same time, in-house lawyers need to require this same thing from their colleagues to be able to do their work effectively (because people usually assume that others know more about their subject than they actually do).

Another thing I’d like to highlight is that in an in-house setting, you really learn the ins and outs of the company’s business. In a law firm, many people work with one company for, say, three months and then move on to the next case. That’s surface scratching compared to what you learn in-house about the company’s business. 😉

You have probably heard about these differences before from other people, but I’d like to stress that it’s different to hear this stuff from others than to actually experience it for yourself. I truly recommend every attorney to try out the in-house side at least through a secondment. It’s a great learning experience!

Has the law firm background helped you in your current job?

The law firm background has helped me TREMENDOUSLY. This is no joke. Remedians say that I am a “fixer”, which sounds super cool. The way I see it is that I am just coordinating stuff as professionally as I can, like I learned to do it at Hannes Snellman.

You originally started at Hannes Snellman as an office support trainee when you were a first-year law student, and then later you returned to work as a trainee and lawyer in our M&A Team. What advice would you give yourself on your first day of law school and on your first day working at a law firm?

You will make lots of silly mistakes. That’s normal and part of the process.

What is your favourite memory from your time at Hannes?

First thing that comes to mind is probably working on a high-profile deal X, Y, Z when the deal was announced to the public. That type of stuff was usually very rewarding. 😊

One theme that currently stands out in working life discussions is purpose at work. To conclude this interview, we would like to know what the things are that keep you going and motivated at work — what is your purpose?

It’s probably to be as good as I can in my field (and increasingly outside of it) and to be able to help people with my skillset and knowledge. And to be able to see that my colleagues are happy with my input and feeling that I was able to solve something for them or to add value.