Team : 5

What are the most significant cases, projects, or transactions that you and your legal team have recently been involved in?

Much of the team’s work over the past year has been corporate and regulatory in nature, and necessarily I can only speak about it in general terms. We’ve supported a group-level reorganisation, including a couple of significant intragroup mergers aimed at simplifying and rationalising the corporate structure. Alongside that, a significant strand has been regulatory and authorisation work — obtaining the administrative authorisations needed to operate in regulated activities and standing up two new regulated businesses from a legal standpoint: an insurance agency and a mortgage brokerage. That meant building the licensing, governance and compliance framework for each almost from the ground up. The rest of the team’s time goes to the regulatory side of running a marketplace at scale — data protection, consumer protection and the evolving EU framework on digital services and AI — and to products and contract review and general compliance with laws. Honestly, the work I’m proudest of rarely becomes a “case” at all, because we tend to catch things at the product or contract stage. We are always business oriented.

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

When instability hits, my approach follows three steps. First, I deliberately slow the legal response down just enough to establish the facts, even as the rest of the business is accelerating — most poor decisions under pressure come from acting on an incomplete or assumed picture, so I start by separating what we actually know from what we’re guessing. Second, I prioritise: I work out what genuinely has to be decided today versus what only feels urgent, so the team focuses its energy instead of firefighting everything at once. Third, and most importantly, I rely on the groundwork laid before the crisis — clear contracts that allocate risk sensibly, a clean corporate structure, and fast access to reliable information. That preparation is what really determines resilience: when the foundations are solid, a crisis becomes something the organisation manages calmly rather than something that overwhelms it.

We are currently living through a time of geopolitical change, and the world order that we have come to take for granted for many years is being rewritten. Does this affect your company’s risk profile and, if so, what are you doing to mitigate this?

We’re not as directly exposed as a manufacturer or an energy company, but the effects reach us through regulation, and through the macro environment that drives the property and real estate market — interest rates, investment flows, the cost of credit. The bigger shift for us is regulatory: a more fragmented and fast-moving rulebook in Europe, from data and AI to digital-market rules. We mitigate it the unglamorous way — by staying close to those developments early, building compliance into products by design rather than retrofitting it, and keeping enough flexibility in our contracts and processes to adapt without starting from scratch each time the rules move.

General counsel often speak of the need to be strategic to reach the pinnacle of the profession. What does being strategic mean to you?

Strategic, to me, comes down to one thing: being involved early. I want to be part of a conversation while a product or a deal is still just an idea, not called in at the end to put a legal stamp on something that’s already decided. If the legal department only shows up after the fact, all it can do is slow things down. Get in early and you can actually shape the outcome, when changing course still costs almost nothing. The other half of it is being honest about risk. Not every risk is worth avoiding, and a good part of my job is helping colleagues see which ones are and which ones aren’t — so that a legal department ends up being a reason to move forward with confidence rather than a reason to hesitate.