Velden helps businesses navigate legal, regulatory and governance questions without turning every problem into a process.
None of these are exotic. All of them come up in diligence, in a security review, or in the first bad week. They are cheap to fix early and expensive to fix once someone else has asked.
Ongoing senior legal capacity without the headcount. Commercial contracting, customer and supplier negotiation, employment questions, corporate governance, board support, and deciding what genuinely needs outside counsel and what does not. A set number of days a month, with a real person who knows the business rather than a new associate each time.
For scale-ups between outside counsel and a first GCThe EU AI Act, GDPR, NIS2 and the contractual layer underneath them. Classifying systems, building documentation that survives a customer's security review, data processing agreements, international transfers, vendor and model due diligence, and embedding legal review into product development early enough that it does not become a rebuild.
For product teams shipping AI into regulated marketsStanding up legal and compliance where it does not exist, or exists only on paper. Governance framework, policy architecture, delegation of authority, contract standards, playbooks, intake and escalation. Built to be run by the people who will inherit it, with the training to hand it over properly.
For companies making their first senior legal hireGetting a company into a state where diligence is uneventful. Contract and IP hygiene, corporate records, licensing and regulatory posture, employment and contractor arrangements, privacy documentation, and the specific gaps that stall a funding round, a customer's procurement process, or a sale.
For founders raising, selling, or entering a new marketStart with the business objective, not the legal question. The question you get asked is rarely the one that matters, and a good answer to the wrong question is expensive in both directions.
Risk expressed as probability and severity is unusable. Risk expressed as what it costs, what it blocks, and who has to decide is something a business can actually act on.
Most compliance failure is not too little process. It is process nobody follows, because there was more of it than the company could carry.
A dynasty can go on believing in its own vigour long after the evidence has turned, because the people assessing performance are the people whose performance is being assessed. Organisations do the same thing.
The Habsburg Quotient measures that distance: what a company asserts about itself, what its own records show, and what happens when the two are set side by side by someone who wrote neither.
Used before an investment, after an incident, or when a new executive needs to know what they have taken on. Delivered as findings a board can act on, not a maturity score.
Policies say one thing. Contracts, approvals, escalations and the last three incidents say another. The gap is where the risk lives, and it is almost never where the risk register says it is.
Velden is a single-practitioner firm. The person you meet is the person who does the work.
Nearly two decades at general counsel and head-of-function level in international companies, including a listed group and an aerospace multinational. Built a global legal and compliance function from nothing across more than twenty countries and ran it as the senior-most legal authority. Negotiated billion-dollar commercial agreements. Led the legal workstream on a USD 1.8 billion sale as acting general counsel. Served as data privacy officer for a multinational and took a product organization through EU AI Act and NIS2 readiness.
US-qualified and Copenhagen-based, advising boards and executive teams directly for most of that time.
An agreed number of days a month at a fixed fee. Best for fractional GC work, where the value comes from knowing the business rather than reading in each time.
Fixed scope, fixed price, agreed end date. Readiness reviews, AI Act classification, a contracting program, a policy build, a diagnostic.
A small monthly minimum for companies that mainly need someone to ask before they sign, not someone in every meeting.
If you already know what you need, say so. If you only know that something is not right, that is a reasonable place to begin and often a more useful one. First conversation is free and does not require a brief.