Billable Hour Skeptic, Diversity Advocate Now BASF’s Top Lawyer

BASF SE, a chemical giant with a large litigation docket, has appointed an American, Matthew Lepore, to be its global general counsel and chief compliance officer.

Lepore spent the past three years as a senior vice president and global head of legal from BASF’s headquarters in Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Germany. He confirmed via email his new role at BASF, first reported Tuesday by German legal publication Juve.

As of May 1, Lepore succeeded Wolfgang Haas, a German lawyer who spent the past decade as BASF’s global legal chief with responsibility for the company’s tax, insurance, intellectual property, and customs teams. Lepore will assume the bulk of those duties, although tax and customs will be overseen by BASF in-house lawyer Oliver Nussbaum, according to Juve.

The promotion of Lepore makes the former DLA Piper partner—who has publicly expressed an aversion to the billable hour and a commitment to diversity and inclusion —the leader of a nearly 200-lawyer legal department operated by the world’s largest chemical producer.

In an emailed statement to Bloomberg Law ahead of Ascension Day, a public holiday in Germany, Lepore said that “the topics of alternative legal pricing and diversity in the law are passions of mine, and in my new role I will continue to press them in different ways around the world.”

BASF initially hired Lepore in January 2014 to be general counsel for BASF Corp., the Florham Park, N.J.-based North American subsidiary of the company. Lepore took the role, in which he oversaw about 100 BASF lawyers from Mexico to Michigan, after spending more than five years in-house at pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc.

At Pfizer, Lepore had about 60 employees in his purview and was the company’s corporate secretary and chief governance officer. Pfizer hired him in 2008 from DLA Piper, where the former federal prosecutor spent about two years as a partner.

Lepore previously worked at Preuss Shanagher Zvoleff & Zimmer, a San Francisco-based litigation boutique absorbed in 2002 by Philadelphia-based Drinker Biddle & Reath. The latter, now Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath following another law firm combination, spoke with Lepore in 2017 for an alumni profile that noted the New Jersey native’s role revamping BASF’s legal operations.

At BASF, Lepore sought to increase efficiency and improve relationships with the company’s outside firms, as well as recruit diverse candidates to its in-house ranks. The Leadership Council on Legal Diversity credited Lepore in 2018 with increasing the number of diverse attorneys working at BASF and implementing important changes to staffing models for firms doing work on behalf of the company.

BASF was one of more than 70 corporate law departments in 2018 to sign onto the Mansfield Rule, a Diversity Lab-led initiative designed to grow the number of women and minority lawyers hired by large companies and their external legal advisers.

BASF’s Legal Challenges

In 2018, Lepore left his role at BASF in Florham Park to move to Ludwigshafen and swap roles with Stefan John, the company’s former senior vice president of legal.

The move, as noted at the time by Juve, was inspired by a mutual desire by both lawyers to harmonize the operations of BASF’s massive legal group. Lepore told Juve that the U.S. legal team usually focused more on litigation, while those in Germany bore the brunt of BASF’s transactional work.

Reorganizing the way that BASF’s law department functioned globally became a necessity to ensure that the company was effectively allocating resources and becoming more efficient. The switch also exposed Lepore and John to different cultures and ways of doing business.

The Berlin-born John, who once worked as an associate at Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle in New York, remains general counsel and compliance chief for BASF’s North American operations. Like Lepore, John has been involved in BASF’s diversity efforts.

Lepore now reports directly to Martin Brudermueller, chairman of the board and CEO for BASF. Soeren Bauermann, another BASF lawyer in Germany, has taken over Lepore’s former role as senior vice president of legal.

DLA Piper, Lepore’s former firm, has handled more than 36% of BASF’s U.S. federal litigation work in the last five years, according to Bloomberg Law data. Other large law firms busy appearing in federal courts for the company during that time include Weil, Gotshal & Manges; Mayer Brown; Lepore’s other former firm Faegre Drinker; and labor and employment-focused Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart.

On the deal side, BASF turned to DLA Piper for outside counsel on its cooperation agreement last year with French mining giant Eramet SA. Both companies have pledged to work together to process cobalt and nickel, two chemical elements increasingly in demand by the growing electric vehicle industry.

BASF, riding a rebound in demand for plastics, is reportedly exploring a potential sale of U.S. chemical assets that could fetch it $400 million. The company, also facing a reckoning over its production of petrochemicals, agreed last year to a $72.5 million talc fraud settlement along with its outside lawyers at Cahill Gordon & Reindel, which had represented BASF in long-running, asbestos-related litigation.

Other items on BASF’s litigation docket include antitrust claims, environmental entanglements, and product liability issues. Perhaps the busyness of the job is why Lepore, in his Faegre Drinker alumni profile, said he likes to be concise.

“My communications are short and to the point. My boss is the CEO and he needs to know something from me in two sentences,” Lepore said. “So many times I’ll get something that is 25 pages. Lawyers need to get that.”