Hired in 2007 after a seven-year period with a La Coruña-based multidisciplinary law firm, Oscar Galán Ferro is legal department director at French multinational Eiffage covering its businesses in Spain and Portugal. His experience in private practice informed his organisation of the legal function with Eiffage, and his Master’s degree in business law allowed him to develop ‘expertise alongside a knowledge of private and business law’; the ideal candidate to meld legal skills with business expertise.

In his opinion, the biggest challenge for the in-house counsel is ‘to implement a system and procedures to coordinate all internal and external legal advisors of companies so information flows in an orderly manner’. As well as this, Galán is clear that a part of any in-house lawyers work must be ‘preventive and didactic’, as they have ‘to lead to the conduct of companies and their managers with good corporate governance practices’. His period as head of department has been highly successful, with major projects including ‘the internal reordering of the activity of the companies via mergers, splits and liquidations of companies’.

However, Galán makes it clear that ‘all the above could not be achieved without a team of internal lawyers and the collaboration of external law firms in specific operations and litigations, to provide an agile and effective response to expositions made to our department’, highlighting his collaborative mind-set.