Paula Viegas joined Accenture as a contract manager in 2008 and subsequently went on to lead the entire contract management legal team in Portugal and Angola between 2012 and 2015, providing business-facing and compliance legal advice, and supporting both internal teams and important external clients. During this period, Viegas made a strong impression via her involvement in one of the most relevant and innovative projects for the Portuguese National Health Service at the time.

Considered a complete success and a model to inspire other projects and countries, the project involved the implementation and operation of an Invoice Verification Centre for medical prescriptions and a complementary means of diagnosis. ‘As a legal professional I had the chance to confirm in every way the greatness of Accenture and of its professionals involved, to manage complex projects and to increase my business and legal acumen’, Viegas claims. In 2015, Viegas was appointed to her current role of legal director, in which she now supports all internal enterprise areas and coordinates with Accenture’s global legal teams, developing the organisation’s Iberian strategy and supporting its business shape. ‘Exercising my current role every day makes me feel professionally and personally fulfilled and happy,’ Viegas says. ‘Every day I experience that when we conciliate experience, expertise, intellectual seriousness and are open to new ideas and new technology we give ourselves the opportunity to learn more, to be creative and to reach further’.

During the last three years, Viegas has also divided the work conducted in her department by legal areas and type of work based on each moment of company requirements, thus achieving impressive efficiency, specialisation and flexibility. This, according to Viegas, enables her team to ‘deal with new matters and thus increase people engagement’, and allows ‘the legal leadership to focus on strategic thinking and projects that require a more dedicated and direct support to the statutory and executive bodies of the company’.