Euskaltel Group is a telecoms company which comprises the three main operators in northern Spain: Euskaltel in the Basque country, R in Galicia and Telecable in Asturias. In December 2015, Juan Manuel Sánchez Padrós assumed his current role as director of legal and regulation of the group, this came after a successful tenure at R, where he was secretary to the board and head of legal and regulation for 17 years.

During this time Sánchez created the company’s in-house legal department, where he explains making the legal and regulatory issues ‘part of the DNA of R, closing the main contracts and implementing corporate defence policies’, as well as carrying out corporate duties in his role of secretary to the board. Speaking on the significant recent transactions he has advised on, Sánchez names the acquisition of Telecable, the regional cable operator of Asturias, for €700m in July 2017 as well as the issuance of short commercial papers amounting to €200m in March of the same year.

Also – evincing his position at the forefront of upcoming European regulation – Sánchez notes the importance of the implementation of the new European regulation on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of this data. In addition to these affairs, Sánchez has also overseen a number of internal changes to improve the efficiency and capacity of the legal department. Sanctioned by his business colleagues to conduct the integration of the Group’s legal teams, he explains how Group companies are located in different territories and that they each have lawyers in all territories, but all the companies provide the same services.

He was permitted to ‘optimise resources, distributing the tasks of the function [based on] the skills of the lawyers (not depending on their geographical location), to take advantage of the legal experience of the team members, to reduce the response time to the internal clients and to avoid duplicities’. The other key change Sánchez has implemented is connected with standard contract forms, which are applicable to the companies of the group for several different types of agreements with providers and large account clients. All of this, combined with the instructions provided to colleagues involved in the negotiations to complete the contracts.

The main advantages are ‘training on the meaning and characteristics of the different types of contracts and its clauses and the reduction of time for signature and the advance of revenue in the case of agreements with clients’. Owing to his outstanding career and his diligence in terms of industry challenges, Sánchez suggests a number of qualities he feels in-house counsel should aspire to in order to provide the best service possible.

He claims in-house lawyers must ‘know and understand the business, [as] this is the only way to deliver value with the advice provided, to find solutions solving problems, to be proactive alerting of possible problems or situations derived from the new regulations and/or business as usual matters, proposing changes in the processes and the ways to carry out the business’.