Team size: Two

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

Over the past year, our team’s work has been largely focused on supporting the development of new products and services that our companies are bringing to the market. The common thread across much of what we have been involved in is the intersection of innovation and regulation — projects where the legal function is not just a checkpoint, but a genuine part of the design process.

This kind of work draws on a broad range of legal disciplines and requires a transversal approach that goes beyond any single area of expertise. What makes it particularly interesting is the challenge of ensuring that compliance with Portuguese legal requirements and the real-world relevance of what is being built reinforce, rather than undermine, each other. Getting that balance right, from the earliest stages of a project, is where we feel the legal function can contribute most meaningfully.

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? 

The shift has been gradual but significant: from a reactive function, called upon to manage problems and sign off on decisions already made, to a team that is woven into the fabric of how the organisation thinks and plans. Much of this change has been driven by the environment itself. Regulatory complexity and growing expectations around compliance have made early legal involvement not just useful, but necessary. Today, the value we add is less about saying yes or no, and more about helping the organisation find a path that is legally sound, practically workable, and built to last. That is a more demanding role, but also a more interesting one.

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

Given the nature of our business, technology has always been part of the landscape – something the legal function needed to understand, not just advise around. That familiarity has been an advantage, but the pace of change in recent years has raised the bar considerably. Tools for document analysis, legislative monitoring and legal research have made the team faster and more thorough, freeing up space for work that requires genuine judgment. More broadly, legal sits increasingly close to the business as it adopts new technologies, helping to assess risk and ensure that innovation moves forward on solid ground. The legal questions this raises, e.g., around artificial intelligence and data privacy,  are not peripheral issues for us, but central ones. Being close to that reality, rather than catching up with it, is something we consider both a responsibility and one of the more engaging aspects of the work.