About

Overseeing a team of mixed professionals including lawyers, paralegals and engineers, Giuseppe Manzo has spent over five years with the Techint group after being hired from a role in private practice to shift the function into one that performed work internally rather than outsourcing to external counsel. These changes significantly affected the legal and corporate affairs department of Techint, the international conglomerate headquartered in Milan. Quickly gaining the trust of management and company owners, Manzo impacted the business strategy due to his ability to give informed decisions with legal and corporate matters. Manzo improved the ability of the legal team to deal with challenges by tightening up internal structures, which can now ‘perform new procedural activities to render work more effectively from a legal perspective’. Proving to be extremely successful and endorsing the quality of the work done in-house, he notes that it was ‘decided not to externalise work’ for a major deal involving the project financing of four hospitals worth €400m. Encountering challenges related to the engineering industry’s reliance on volatile oil prices, Manzo highlights the need to steer the group through both commercial and operational challenges, and the fact that it significantly impacts the legal team. Making particular reference to postponed or cancelled investments and the litigation the market situation brings, Manzo identifies the outcomes of these challenges as the way the legal team prove their value to the business, avoiding litigation and dealing with the higher volume of claims. A closely-trusted business partner, Manzo’s consultation even extends to attending meetings about matters outside of the typical legal realm. He states it is ‘important to have an understanding of technical matters – we must try to understand these because in that way advice is about very high value. Commercial people realised there was added value in involving me not just for legal work, but to be able to help and advise them how to present a case to management and what property to invest money in or not’.