About

Patchi is an industry leading confectionary e-commerce company from Lebanon with a global presence, specialising in chocolates, baklavas and other confections. Patchi’s legal team consists of three members: Joumana Younes, manager of the legal department, Jodelle Aoun, senior legal counsel and Lama Nasser, legal affairs specialist. During the past couple of years, the team has made two major internal structural changes. Firstly, it completed the restructuring of the group’s corporate structure, and secondly, it achieved the group’s cost efficiency goals through significantly reducing its external resources. It now handles most of the workload that it used to send previously to its external counsel. Furthermore, the team has played an important role through advising and accompanying the group in the negotiation of key transactions and was key in building the infrastructure of many other crucial projects such as e-commerce portals and business expansion in new territories. Nasser describes the legal team at Patchi as, ‘small but, with its joint skills and efforts, is able to meet the group’s growing needs and evolving strategies’. She also had the following to say regarding the department’s recent development: ‘Over the years and with its hard work, the team has developed its flexibility and reliability that put [it] at the forefront of the group’s recent negotiations and agreements, and more importantly it has developed its business-oriented approach to legal matters, which helped enormously in the conclusion of deals in a timely manner’. Adapting to the recent changes in privacy and banking regulations including the documentation necessary for reporting account activity and opening new accounts has been a particular challenge for the legal team, but one at which it has excelled.