Team size: 27 

I began my legal career at Uría Menéndez, where I worked for nearly seven years advising on commercial and financial matters. After joining CaixaBank, I focused my practice on advising companies and corporate clients on a wide range of structured financing transactions, including asset finance and project finance operations across different sectors and countries. In 2019, I was awarded the Europe Rising Star Award for In House Counsel by Euromoney. Since 2019, I have also been a Solicitor of England and Wales.

In my current role, I lead a team of 28 legal professionals responsible for providing legal support on corporate and business financing. Our scope includes corporate and acquisition finance, working capital facilities, trade finance, real estate and tourism financing, interbank transactions, and other complex structured finance products. Beyond transactional work, my team plays a fundamental role within the bank in continuously updating and enhancing the operational processes and products related to business and corporate clients, actively participating in numerous strategic projects that drive these improvements.

AI has been taken seriously as a potentially revolutionary technological change in the legal world for a number of years now. Has it had a meaningful impact in how your legal team works in this time? 

AI has begun to meaningfully influence the way our legal team operates, particularly in terms of efficiency, standardisation and internal coordination. While we apply it in a controlled and responsible manner, AI tools have allowed us to streamline document reviews, improve first draft preparation and enhance our ability to analyse large volumes of regulatory or contractual information. This has enabled us not only to focus our time on higher value legal judgement and strategic decision making, but also to stay closer to the business and support it more effectively on a day-to-day basis with clients by providing faster and more solution oriented legal advice.

In parallel, AI has supported the modernisation of our internal workflows, helping us adopt more agile methodologies across the legal function. It has reinforced consistency, accelerated internal processes and contributed to greater operational clarity in high volume areas such as financing documentation and product governance. Although still evolving, AI is already proving to be a useful catalyst for increasing both efficiency and legal certainty within the team.

How does your team contribute to the overall business strategy of the company? Can you share an example of a recent legal-led initiative that had a significant impact?

My team plays a strategic role in strengthening the bank’s value proposition for legal entity clients by ensuring that products, processes and legal frameworks evolve in line with market, regulatory and supervisory demands. We work closely with business, risk and operations to modernise the bank’s offering for companies, improving operational efficiency, reducing execution risks and enabling the safe deployment of new financing solutions.

Internally, we are actively transforming the way the legal function works. We have streamlined review processes, promoted earlier cross functional alignment and standardised key documentation, significantly improving agility, consistency and delivery times. This internal modernisation has strengthened our ability to support high volume and high complexity matters while maintaining legal certainty.

A high impact initiative led by AJ and delivered by the team focused on strengthening legal risk control in online contracting, particularly in relation to powers of attorney and legal sufficiency checks (bastanteos). By redesigning the applicable legal standards and control mechanisms, the project enhanced legal certainty, reduced execution risk and enabled the safe scaling of digital contracting solutions for legal entity clients, while improving overall efficiency and coordination.