About

A highly respected Spanish lawyer, Maria Luz Medrano Aranguren is the vice general counsel and chief legal officer of Telefónica, the number one Spanish multinational by market capitalisation and one of the largest private telecommunications companies in the world. She leads a team of 21 lawyers and coordinates a further 32 in global operations. She is also in charge of the Hispanic-America Unit and operations in Brazil, as well as digital and global resources. Medrano Aranguren started at Telefónica in 1995 as a legal advisor and since then has introduced important changes in the workings of the legal department. ‘Telefónica is a very big group and all processes, such as flow of information or approval of engagement of law firms, are very complex. My main target was to simplify them and improve the level of information flow’. Medrano Aranguren played an important role in the handling of the legal work for one of Telefónica’s most important deals, the joint venture with Portugal Telecom for the group’s mobile assets in Brazil. ‘The negotiations for this joint venture were very complex, but at the end we had a very successful outcome’. The market changes in the telecommunications industry, with the appearance of new competitors and new digital companies, have been a major challenge for the company during the last few years. The legal team has been particularly proactive in supporting the technical team during the development of new competitive products and applications that are not exposed to legal risks and that has been widely recognised by the business.