Career Biography

Maria du Vall is a lawyer, manager, mediator, mentor and lecturer, and a graduate of the Faculty of Law and Administration at Jagiellonian University. She specialises in legal advisory work and litigation in the areas of intellectual property law, unfair competition, press law, and copyright protection, working primarily with clients from the broadly defined creative industries.

She also delivers training on intellectual property and the commercialisation of IP at universities, within professional organisations, and for private‑sector clients.

Maria is an active mentor with the Women in Law Foundation and a member of the Polish In‑house Lawyers Association (PILA).

How can a legal director build an organisational culture supporting ESG principles and compliance at all levels of the enterprise?

In 2025, as a person responsible for the legal area, I actively participated in the DMA (double materiality analysis) process in the Group of companies not only at the Governance level but also in the E and S areas.

Due to the specifics of the operations of the Group of Companies being my client, the huge diversification of services provided, acquisitions and investments made, including conducting business in areas covered by environmental protection, cooperation in the environmental area has always been closely linked to the legal department, focusing on ensuring compliance of the Company’s activities as an investor with legal provisions. ESG required a re-framing of thinking both in the legal area and the entire organisation towards the aspect of going beyond legal and financial frameworks.

To exemplify, it is worth mentioning the active building of the Climate and Environmental Policy by the teams, as well as finding areas that allow for cooperation with stakeholders, auditors, and build a completely different approach to the area – not as a challenge and obligation but as a potential that builds the company’s market position.

The legal department also cooperated continuously and dynamically with the HR department at the stage of analysing double materiality, but above all in the field of creating organisational documents regarding the Code of Ethics, Diversity Policy, and analysis of the topic of taxonomy of the pay gap.

The legal team was one of the active elements building the organisational culture based on the values developed in the ESG Strategy adopted by the Management Board. The team cooperated with advisors, internal stakeholders, and participated in building the supply/value chain.

The role of the legal department is to build awareness in the Management Board regarding ESG, support the teams working in individual areas, not just in Governance; assistance in identifying areas that naturally fit into the process of building the foundations of ESG within the organisation, organising training, and providing support to find a way to show the potential in ESG Reporting and the benefits stemming from it, precisely in building company value based, among others, on the ESG Strategy.

I believe that the cooperation of lawyers in building organisational culture is very valuable and allows for its implementation “in small but extremely significant steps”.