Dr. Manfred Balz LLM (Harvard)

Manfred Balz is a senior counsel in the Frankfurt office of Mayer Brown’s Corporate practice. He is active particularly in the areas of Corporate/M&A, Restructuring and Compliance.

Between 2008 and 2012, Manfred was a Member of the Management Board of Deutsche Telekom AG, in charge of Privacy, Legal and Compliance. This department had been newly created to entrench the issues of data protection/privacy and data security as well as internal legal advisory at the highest level of the Group. Prior to his position as Member of the Management Board, he was General Counsel of Telekom for more than ten years (1997-2008). Between 1993 and 1997, Manfred was a partner with an international corporate law firm and Head of its Berlin office. He advised particularly German and American clients on German and international commercial and corporate law, M&A and German and international bankruptcy law. Previously, he was General Counsel of Treuhandanstalt in the years following the German reunification. Subsequent to research periods in Harvard and Saint Petersburg/Moscow, Manfred started his professional career in 1974 at the Federal Ministry of Justice, where he worked on the EU harmonization of company law and specifically the bankruptcy law reform. In parallel to his activities, he was the permanent chairman of the European Council Committee on Bankruptcy from 1989 to 1996 and in this role had significant influence on the European Convention on Insolvency Proceedings.