fivehundred magazine > > Interview with… Rosa Vidal

Interview with… Rosa Vidal

Rosa Vidal career timeline

State Lawyer 1997. Graduate in law from the University of Valencia, she has also studied Business Administration at the Universidad San Pablo CEU.

She has been the Secretariat of the Council of Administration of the Port Authority of Castellón and substitute Secretariat of the Regional Administrative Economic Court of Valencia, a Member of the Provincial Jury of Compulsory Expropriation of Soria and Castellón, Deputy Director of the Regional Legal Service of the State Agency of Tax Administration in Valencia and President of the Board of Directors and Director General of RTVV, among others.

Author of various publications. Lecturer of Administrative Law at the Universidad San Pablo CEU and at ISDE Business School.

Rosa leads the Public Law Departament of BROSETA and she is Managing Partner of the Firm.

What sets your firm apart from others in Spain?
BROSETA is an Iberian legal advisory firm with a well-established presence in the middle market and a growing penetration in large organisations.

The differential pillars on which we base our service and on the basis of which we have the trust of more and more top-level companies are:

Vocation of partnership with the client. We participate in the business strategy of our clients as members of their team, and we accompany them, with solid and long term relationships, both in their successes and in difficult moments.

Transformation as a key to growth. We reject static and standardized solutions. Each client is a challenge and their needs define our service proposal. We grow the value of our customers based on a differentiated way of doing things.

Our partners, in the first line of response. We put the Firm’s team of partners at the forefront of all our projects. Professionals with an average of 30 years of experience, close, proactive and involved with the client in every relevant decision.

Agile and flexible firm. Our structure allows us to adapt to the most complex environments with proactivity, and to react to any contingency with the efficiency demanded by the market and the client.

As well as having a presence in Spain, Portugal and Switzerland, Broseta forms part of the Ibero-American Legal Network. How important is this network for the firm, and has this international alliance been impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020?

How did the firm adapt its working practices in light of the restrictions put in place due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and what lessons did the firm learn from this period which it can take forward for the future?

BROSETA’s strategic planning to face the contingencies derived from the expansion of COVID-19 in our environment had its point of origin during the first week of March. In this context, BROSETA carried out a strategic rethink for the current financial year based on two areas: organisational management and business development.

At the management level, the objective was to define the Firm’s new lines of action with its main stakeholders (employees, clients, suppliers), in the context of the contingencies that could arise as a result of the pandemic.

To this end, we formed the COVID-19 Action Committee, a body led by the Firm’s management (managing partner, managing partner in Valencia and managing partner in Lisbon) and with the support of the Staff departments.

Some of the main strategic lines of action of this Committee have been: exhaustive control of business scenarios; increasing the Firm’s technological capacity; formation of independent sub-teams within each business area that operate as “response teams” to activities or actions that require physical presence in the office or in other stakeholder facilities (thus avoiding possible multiple contagion); flexible remuneration, etc.

Among other aspects, these measures have enabled the Firm to closely monitor the financial situation at all times and, at the same time, guarantee business continuity for clients due to fully operational teams.

In terms of business development, the objective was to redefine the Firm’s service proposal in the new scenario (new products, service approaches, communication actions, etc.).

To this end, we formed the Legal LAB COVID-19, a legal council made up of different partners from each of the Firm’s practice areas (16 partners, 50% of the total), with the support of the Business Development team.

To highlight the work carried out by this body, the #BROSETAvsCOVID19 initiative was launched, a claim that has been the common thread running through all of the Firm’s communications in relation to COVID-19 over the last few months.

In addition to generating content related to the current situation and aimed at stakeholders, this body designed a short- and medium-term business strategy to promote existing services that have been less recurrent to date or to create new ones based on the specific needs that have arisen, together with recurring services.

Thus, the services promoted in this period and on which special focus has been placed have been: services for claiming the Administration’s liability; advice on business reorganisations; employment advice; refinancing operations and financial restructuring; investment opportunities with the gradual exit from the crisis; insolvency administration, or mediation, among others.

Looking to the future, the crisis has highlighted in an extreme way the VUCA scenarios in which organisations move today, environments that force us to adapt to changes continuously and that affect both strategic planning and professional routines.

Thus, our goal for the coming years will be to continue growing, doing so in a sustained manner and with the values that have always characterised us, and based on these premises we will try to find opportunities to integrate teams that will bring us value in this way, both in the geographies in which we already operate and in others where we can identify opportunities.

Obviously in this new stage our future will also be absolutely linked to the consolidation of digitalisation, but without forgetting that business law is an absolutely relational profession.

In addition, over the coming months, and in a scenario of probable recovery, we will promote as services the advice on investment opportunities, as we believe that there will be a significant increase in investor interest in our country; mediation and arbitration, given the collapse of our judicial system; and advice, from a multidisciplinary approach, on comprehensive business restructuring processes, an absolute necessity from our point of view in the post-Covid era.

Broseta recently incorporated a team of tax lawyers in Valencia, led by Enrique Vázquez and Miguel Ángel Galán. What were the reasons behind these hires, and what are your expectations for the firm’s tax practice in 2021?

These recruitments are in line with our strategic objectives, which consider a scenario of continued growth over the coming years under the premises of profitability, sustainability and shared values.

The new team, led by Enrique Vázquez, who joins as a partner and head of the Valencia area, and Miguel Ángel Galán, who joins as a partner, is also made up of Jaime Escribano, Ramón Varanda, Mauro Sebastián, Anabel Naval, Aurora López and Isabel Vicente, professionals with extensive experience in leading national and international legal services firms.

With their integration, BROSETA consolidates, under the global management of the practice by partner Carlos Diéguez, one of the most outstanding Iberian tax advisory structures, with around 40 professionals providing advice on highly strategic projects.

This is a very important growth project for us, which also complements our range of services with the Accounting and Tax Management line, a service that is increasingly in demand and in which the team that has joined us has a notable track record.

This incorporation also reinforces BROSETA’s service capabilities and expertise in strategic sectors in which the new team already works with leading organisations, such as renewable energies, the agri-food sector and infrastructures, among others.

Aside from tax, are there any other areas that the firm plans to expand or bolster in the coming months and years?

At BROSETA we are always open to new challenges that boost our organisation and contribute to providing a better service to our clients, which, together with the care of our talent, is one of our main objectives.

In this sense, a few days ago we have also reinforced our Labour Law team with the incorporation as partners of Marta Alamán and Alberto Fernández Irízar.

Marta and Alberto are two professionals with a consolidated track record in the field of legal advice, and with their incorporation to the Firm we are strengthening our value proposition based on service excellence, multidisciplinarity and the national and international dimension of our advice.

Marta Alamán, who will take over the management of the area in Madrid, has been part of PwC for almost 30 years, being responsible for the creation and management of the labour law department, and also leading its international labour law network.

Alberto Fernández Irízar, who also joins the Madrid team as a partner, has been a member of PwC’s labour law team, in his case for more than ten years, at international firms such as Eversheds Sutherland.

These additions consolidate and increase the Firm’s relevance in the field of employment law, and for us they represent an extraordinary boost to the practice at a transcendental time for organisations in this area.

Renewable energy has been booming in Spain in recent years. What are your expectations for this sector in 2021?

It will undoubtedly be one of the main sectors of activity in 2021, in line with the objectives and demands that the European Union is requiring of its Member States to be more responsible societies and economies concerned about our environment.

At BROSETA we are aware of this and in the first quarter of the year we are going to hold a Cycle of Conferences on the subject, in which we will have leading personalities in this field, from former Ministers to CEOs of leading organisations in the field.

We want to contribute to the debate and provide solutions to our customers in an environment where we all need to be increasingly aware that the green transition is here to stay, and we need to join forces from all perspectives.

From a purely business point of view, we have been detecting considerable investment interest in renewable energies in our country for some months now and, according to our forecast, this will continue to be the case in 2021, and as a Firm we have a complete advisory team at all levels of these investment projects, as well as top-level clients in our country.

The firm – including managing partner Rosa Vidal and Blanca Silva – participated in the launch of the Women Action Sustainability (WAS) association in 2020. What are the main objectives of this association?

Our aim is to influence so that sustainability is included in decisions at the highest level, empowering and giving visibility to female talent.

We want WAS to be the meeting place for great sustainability professionals, so that women can help each other, inspire each other, promote each other, and connect with other networks of women from other sectors, both nationally and internationally, with the aim of developing and joining projects that also move us towards a more sustainable society.

To this end, WAS brings together managers and professionals from all sectors of society, who see this change as necessary and who want to make it possible.

And, undoubtedly, from the collaboration between the public and private sectors. When both add their resources, knowledge and experience, the results are more easily achievable.