Team size: Seven

Major legal advisors: Abreu Advogados, Azevedo Cardoso & Associados, CMS Rui Pena e Arnaut, Pares Advogados

Jurisdictions your role covers: Portugal

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

Over the past year, our legal department has operated at the intersection of business enablement and strategic risk management, spearheading critical initiatives across three core pillars: consumer law, real estate expansion and litigation.

In the realm of consumer law and digital transformation, the team has been a pivotal driver of commercial innovation. A major milestone was providing comprehensive, end-to-end legal support for the successful launch of our e-commerce platform, ensuring seamless compliance with digital consumer rights, data privacy, and distance-selling regulations. Complementing this digital expansion, the team also enabled a series of comparative advertising campaigns directed against our primary market competitors. By meticulously challenging traditional legal boundaries while strictly safeguarding absolute compliance, we empowered the business to capture market share through high-impact marketing, completely mitigating reputational and regulatory backlash. 

Regarding real estate law, the legal support provided by our team has been the cornerstone of the company’s expansion strategy. Notably, the team designed and executed the complex legal framework required to structure an extensive portfolio of Build-to-Lease operations. This involved navigating multi-layered contractual networks, complex zoning regulations, and innovative financing structures, thereby establishing a robust, scalable blueprint for the company’s long-term infrastructure and retail footprint.

Finally, in litigation and dispute resolution, the department has defended the company’s interests in several high-profile, high-value disputes. Most significantly, we have been coordinating the strategy for a highly complex, multi-faceted litigation arising from a major construction and infrastructure contract. Managing a dispute of this magnitude has required a sophisticated blend of procedural agility and technical expertise, reinforcing our corporate resilience in the face of systemic exposure.

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

When partnering with external advisors, we look for an extension of our own internal culture. While exceptional technical expertise and responsiveness are baseline expectations, what we value most is deep sector knowledge combined with commercial pragmatism.We value partners who can deliver concise, actionable and solution-oriented advice. Furthermore, in today’s fast-paced corporate environment, we highly value innovative thinking, and the advisors who challenge our assumptions and bring forward-thinking perspectives to complex problems.

How has the role of the legal function evolved within your organisation over recent years, and where do you see it adding the most strategic value today?  

We have successfully transitioned from being viewed as a traditional “gatekeeper” or cost center into becoming trusted strategic business partners. We add value to the business by translating legal complexity into commercial opportunity. Just as mentioned above, regarding our external legal advisors, we deliver concise, actionable and solution-oriented legal advice, to make sure that we work as business enablers. Additionally, we offer innovative thinking and bring forward-thinking perspectives and soluytions to complex problems.

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

Technology and process innovation have been fundamental in redefining our way of working. It has allowed us to shift our focus from routine administrative tasks to high-value strategic work. We have embraced digital transformation by implementing AI tools and automated workflows, which have drastically reduced turnaround times.

However, for our team, innovation is as much about mindset as it is about software. We have adopted agile methodologies to streamline our internal workflows and improve cross-departmental collaboration. By automating repetitive tasks and creating self-service legal templates for internal stakeholders, we have liberated the team’s cognitive bandwidth, allowing us to dedicate our expertise to complex problem-solving.

In what ways does your legal team promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, both within the department and in your external legal partnerships?  

We firmly believe that diversity, equity, and inclusion are not just ethical imperatives, but critical drivers of legal excellence and innovative problem-solving. Within our department, we promote a culture of psychological safety and meritocracy, ensuring equal growth opportunities for all team members and actively fostering an environment where diverse perspectives are heard and valued.