Team size: two

Major legal advisers: BLP and AriasLaw

What are the most significant cases or transactions you and your team have been involved in?

We had to renegotiate lease agreements and further agreements with third parties due to force majeure matters such as the pandemic. These renegotiation processes generated relevant and valuable savings to organisation. During 2019-2020 we were also involved in a complex and successful M&A process.

What do you think are the biggest risks facing your industry now and how are you preparing your team and organization to deal with them? 

More than a risk, I see it as an exciting challenge as higher education is experiencing a deep change due to the emergence of online courses that are replacing face-to-face education. This aspect requires a high level of adaptability from legal departments. Also, the management is requiring that legal teams do more with less, meaning we have less resources to accomplish our goals.

Even in the best-case scenario, COVID is likely to have far-reaching ramifications. How are you safeguarding the long-term health of the business?

We are applying a special focus on ethics, compliance and data protection aspects to prevent eventual negative ramifications from the pandemic. We feel that those areas are now the most important ones. We also adjusted our contract models to reflect the new reality that we are experimenting with (special focus on data protection, force majeure issues and dispute resolutions). In addition, we are applying more technological tools to automatise processes and generate savings to management. As higher education is a highly regulated area we try to monitor and anticipate regulations to prevent far-reaching ramifications.