Jurisdictions your role covers: Portugal, Mozambique, Spain and the United Kingdom. Legal also provides support globally, in alignment with company’s international operations.

What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

The team remained closely involved in Navigator’s ongoing international expansion, providing legal support to cross-border transactions and partnership structures aimed at further consolidating the company’s position in the paper and tissue segments.

On the industrial and investment front, the legal team provided comprehensive support to significant capital projects, including the continued development and operationalisation of the new tissue unit in Aveiro and further infrastructure investments across Navigator’s industrial sites. Legal involvement spanned the full project lifecycle – from contract structuring and procurement to permitting, environmental compliance, and dispute prevention – ensuring that commercial momentum was not compromised by legal or regulatory risk.

Across all of these areas, the team has increasingly acted as a strategic partner to the business, embedding legal considerations into decision-making at an early stage rather than operating reactively – a shift that has meaningfully improved outcomes and reduced risk exposure for the company.

What do you value most in external advisers working alongside your team: sector knowledge, responsiveness, innovation, or something else?

We engage external counsel when a matter requires specialised expertise, such as environmental law, energy, or intellectual property, or when local representation in a specific jurisdiction is essential. In that context, what we value most is genuine sector knowledge paired with commercial awareness. Technical competence is a baseline expectation; what sets the best advisers apart is their understanding of our industry and business objectives, and their ability to translate legal advice into practical outcomes.

Responsiveness and cost-effectiveness matter equally. We assess external counsel on the relevance of their experience, the quality of their approach, and their ability to deliver real value.

In what ways has technology or process innovation changed how your legal team operates? 

Technology has changed less about what we do and more about how efficiently and consistently we do it. More broadly, we approach technology pragmatically. We are attentive to developments in legal AI and document analysis tools, and we assess them on the basis of whether they genuinely improve quality and efficiency in our specific context. The goal is building a legal function that is agile, well-organised, and capable of scaling its support to the business.