Johannes Eyolf Aagaard
Chief Product Officer at .legal
I'm not a lawyer. I say that fairly early in most conversations, not because anyone asks, but because people sometimes start to get that impression.
My way into compliance went through learning by doing, a fair number of mistakes, and a lot of conversations with people who know far more about the subject than I do. Along the way I've become what I call a fake lawyer. I know the article numbers. I have opinions about GDPR. I can talk about NIS2 without looking too confused.
Today I'm CPO at .legal, where we help 400+ organisations manage compliance without it becoming a full-time headache. I stay close to users, close to the market, and as close to the actual regulation as I can, because the gap between those three is usually where the real problems live.
What I work with
On a given week I might be writing ad copy, reviewing a new feature, sitting in on a sales demo, or arguing about a landing page headline. I like it that way.
The throughline is compliance. Specifically, figuring out how to make regulatory requirements feel less like a mountain and more like a sequence of manageable steps. GDPR, NIS2, ISO 27001. The regulation sets the frame. The rest is organisation.
Roles and engagements
- Chief Product Officer .legal →
- Director GDPR.dk →
-
Owner
Forlaget Jalousi
→
A small publishing house I run on the side. It publishes printed books. It's a different kind of product work, but the questions are surprisingly similar.
Perspective
I don't think compliance needs to be this heavy, expensive thing. Most of the complexity is inherited, from bad tools, unclear guidance, or software built for lawyers rather than the people who actually have to use it day to day.
The best compliance work I've seen doesn't look like compliance at all. It looks like a well-run organisation that knows where things are.
More
I write occasionally on LinkedIn about product, compliance and whatever I've been thinking about. Not on a schedule. But when something's worth saying.
Connect on LinkedIn