Team size: 22

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

We turn challenges into opportunities, working closely and in collaboration with local law makers, authorities, putting our customers / clients of Legal (internal and external) in the heart of what we do. We – Legal & Regulatory team lead by example, acting as true business partners. One example was the recent tariffs changes imposed by Trump / US administration where we worked closely with a few local authorities to understand how we could overcome the increased costs by having other cross lateral incentives and COGs reductions, bringing more efficiency to the manufacturing associated costs. Another challenge is the worldwide geopolitics and wars where we assist our global colleagues based on some of the affected regions by shifting some of the legal support and actions to our region enabling them to focus on the local actions they have to at those times.

What strategies do you employ to ensure the successful digital transformation of a legal department while maintaining compliance with your country’s data protection laws?

We are guided by improvements, constantly searching for efficiencies that drive our legal operations to deliver beyond expectations, for that we have used IT and AI technologies and products that are secure and safe to manage our time and free us to focus on strategic projects. Our data analytics/Legal Ops help us to track our legal spending, improve efficiency, and make strategic decisions. We insert the data into our systems to provide us with a report with important insights that allow us to make informed decisions about our legal operations (for example, how we can optimise our in-house/external resource allocation, monitor service delivery (contract review timing), and identify areas for cost savings).

Have you had any experiences during your career as a lawyer that stand out as particularly unique or interesting?

I have been very fortunate to have lived in and worked pretty much in all regions (EMEA, Americas, Asia), I have very interesting projects that I worked with royal families and influential governments, families and companies of some many countries.. One unique aspect of my career is that I shifted from a civil law approach to common law and other mixed legal systems of different countries, leveraging on the common principles and risks associated with business development and ever changes to regulations (from developing countries to most structured rigid countries) to set strategic goals for my teams in the past 15+ years (often composed by multi-jurisdictional and culturally diverse people, each adding their own unique value to the day to day work we do) aiming at Legal acting as true leaders and partners, not just as advisers / supporters of business, but as part of the decision making process influencing, directly impacting long term sustainable business growth.

How can general counsel foster a corporate culture that supports ESG principles and compliance across all levels of the organisation?

ESG is part of our mission, how our EssilorLuxottica Group and each of us return and give back to our world and society. Our ESG objectives are embraced across our organisation and within our legal teams we have the commitment to be ambassadors of these goals, facilitating their implementation, for example, when we choose our the external law firms we will engage, we look at their commitments on ESG, when we assist our reporting teams at HQ we create a network of people who are working locally on ESG objectives and enable them to connect with local authorities and vendors which will fully support those to be achieved. We also deep dive on regional ESG factors to appropriately identify and mitigate associate risks in legal documents and transactions and assist our teams appropriately on the required mitigation implementation actions.