Dr. Peter M. Kleinschmidt, LL.M. (Berkeley)

From 2000 to 2015, he was General Counsel at Airbus in France, first as General Counsel and Corporate Secretary of the Commercial Aircraft Division and then as General Counsel of the entire globally operating group. He remained Special Legal Advisor to top management until the end of 2018.

Before joining Airbus, Peter was responsible for international Mergers & Acquisitions projects at DaimlerChrysler Aerospace in Munich. There he previously headed the legal departments of Dornier Luftfahrt and Dornier Medizintechnik. He began his career in the contract and patent department of Siemens in Munich and then as personal advisor to Dieter von Holtzbrinck of the Georg von Holtzbrinck publishing group in Stuttgart. After completing his Master of Laws degree at the University of California at Berkeley, he worked in an antitrust law firm in San Francisco.

Peter is a top management legal advisor trained in his many years of corporate practice in all legal decision-making and conflict situations critical to the management of an internationally active corporation. In addition to the facets of international business law, his focus is on the rules and processes of corporate governance and compliance, as well as corporate and capital market law in an international environment. He has gained particular expertise in the management of internal investigations and in the cooperation with investigating authorities in the national and international environment.

Since 2010 Peter is a member of the French L’Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur de la Republic Française. He was awarded the rank of a „Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur“.