About

Leading a team of approximately 60 people including 40 lawyers, Iwona Gajek, country legal head and managing director of legal line for the Polish branch of BNP Paribas, has a history of providing outstanding commercial legal advice even during testing corporate circumstances. Recently overseeing a hugely influential change in the business, Gajek was responsible for the creation of an legal IT system to service its entire network of branches. ‘This innovative system facilitates the work of in-house counsels and is also a great tool for the manager, through its ability to send queries, provide responses, archive queries, and it also contains a database of responses provided, which facilitates work’, she explains. Not only transforming work and increasing efficiency, this tool has managed to change perceptions of technology within the business. As Gajek says, ‘initially I saw great distrust and caution of both lawyers not used to such IT advancement and internal customers used to working directly with an in-house counsel’. Gajek has proven her abilities as a facilitator of positive and necessary change in other respects, having faced the key task of creating a joint legal team to serve a complex organisation, providing legal services of the highest quality and acting as partner for the business. Due to the history of the company – the organisation has faced three mergers since 2014 – Gajek has had to achieve goals under extreme pressure. She successfully ‘centralised the legal service in one location’, when legal counsels had worked in 19 separate locations dispersed all over Poland. ‘We combined four different organisational cultures and four different cooperation models, and we managed to create a strong and efficient team’, Gajek explains. Before joining Bank BGŻ BNP Paribas in 2003, Gajek had already amassed nine years of experience in Poland’s financial sector and enjoyed a four spell as manager of the legal service unit within the Ministry of Privatisation’s Ownership Supervision Department between 1900 and 1994.