People at EUROGATE

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  Fascinating instead of really dry

  Dominique Franke, corporate lawyer in Hamburg

   

  Hand on heart – who actually reads through all of the terms and conditions when entering into a contract? For most people, these documents comprising several pages are often tedious and really dry, but Dominique Franke finds them fascinating. “They form the basis for the business relations of a company and are therefore very important”, she says. As a corporate lawyer for EUROGATE, the 34-year old citizen of Hamburg deals on a daily basis with contract law and the drafting of contracts, with civil and commercial law, with transport agreements, leases and contracts for work, as well as with the terms and conditions that “Joe Consumer” finds so dry and boring.

After completing the state exam and legal clerkship, Dominique Franke initially started off as a lawyer in the chemical industry. She worked in the Legal department of a major, globally operating corporate group. She has been working in the HR and legal department of EUROGATE since spring 2014.

“We are mainly concerned with terminal contracts, we inspect and modify existing rules and regulations and create new contracts”, she explains. “We must understand port business in order to be able to translate it into German legalese”, explains Franke. She therefore also doesn’t spend the entire day in the office but is out and about at the terminal and visiting the subsidiaries in order to familiarise herself with the matters at hand.

Contracts with shipowners, for example, govern basic aspects of collaboration: conditions of operations, prices, liability questions and a lot more. “That is always exciting and very interesting”, says the lawyer. Questions of liability in particular are often a focus of her work. “There is an endless number of pitfalls and you have to work precisely to achieve the best outcome for EUROGATE”, she emphasizes.

She has now been working in port business for more than two years but frankly admits: “I am always learning more.” In the meantime, she is also bringing her expertise and knowledge into international contractual arrangements. She therefore was and is involved in the Limassol project, which is the new EUROGATE terminal in the Mediterranean.

Outside of work, the lawyer finds yoga relaxing. She sings regularly in a choir, singing more pop songs than classical music. “Herz über Kopf” [Heart over head] is one of those songs – in complete contrast to her day-to-day work where the head rules.