Team size: 8-10

Career Biography

General Secretary of Secuoya Content Group, overseeing the Legal Department, the Board Secretariat, and ESG policies. His work covers, among other things, corporate governance, business operations, M&A, strategy, and the Group’s sustainability policies, both nationally and internationally.

He is an expert in the media and audiovisual sector in both legal and management/business aspects, with twenty years of experience in the audiovisual sector. He is also a professor of audiovisual business & law at various graduate schools and has served as a speaker at widely attended forums.

What are the most significant cases, projects and/or transactions that you and/or your legal team have recently been involved in?

As the audiovisual sector has had to respond to new paradigms within the audiovisual industry, we have focused on developing three business lines.

On the one hand, we have developed new avenues for the internationalization of our business, focusing on the production of international content — not only content produced in Spain for international markets, but also content produced abroad for international markets. By this, I mean that we have entered into various international agreements with successful international producers, securing first-look deals for the development of English-language projects as a vehicle for expansion. This does not mean that the business of content from Spain for Spain or Spanish-language content for international markets has run its course, but it is true that the market has reached a stage of maturity that has slowed the growth rate; therefore, we have focused on English-language production, primarily targeting foreign markets and treating Spain as a secondary market for these types of products. This has led to very intensive work on corporate restructuring and the acquisition of foreign production companies (which we are still pursuing), presenting a major challenge from both a legal and business perspective.

On the other hand, to be able to make these investments, we have had to refine our financing instruments through debt structures with investment funds that allow us to continue the business group’s path of inorganic growth. All this work has been carried out by the internal Legal & Business Affairs departments, with the involvement of the group’s finance and IT departments.

At the end, we have committed to developing of Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility policies that are not only necessary for the good governance of the company but have also opened the door to alternative financing channels and enabled us to access international markets that demand being at the forefront of ESG policies. For this reason, the Group is committed to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations 2030 Agenda, which we have been advancing through the Sustainability Department—which reports to the Group’s General Secretariat—until Secuoya became the first company to obtain the TÜV SÜD sustainability seal and the Green Shooting certification for the creation and production of our content. To achieve this milestone, we have created a Sustainable Filming Protocol (PRS) through the development of a Greenbook made available to the entire industry. This innovative initiative establishes a roadmap for reducing the carbon footprint in audiovisual production. Fiction series such as “Zorro” or “Montecristo” have adopted these measures, demonstrating that the decarbonization of large-scale productions is possible.

I believe that all of the above highlights the involvement of the Group’s General Secretary, whose responsibilities include both the Corporate Business & Legal Affairs team and the sustainability division. This has allowed us to retain the know-how of these operations internally, seeking to outsource only the technical aspects of the operations but never the strategic vision of the operations and their integration within the Group’s business. In conclusion, we understand that all of this has enabled the departments reporting to the General Secretariat to consolidate themselves as a team that is (i) multidisciplinary, (ii) playing an active and strategic role in all areas of the business, providing advice across all branches of law (corporate, tax, real estate, regulatory, industrial and intellectual property, etc.), and (iii) a leader in sustainability and CSR initiatives, demonstrating that economic viability and social and environmental commitment can go hand in hand, always backed by a solid and innovative legal framework.

AI has been taken seriously as a potentially revolutionary technological change in the legal world for a number of years now. Has it had a meaningful impact in how your legal team works in this time?

Given that my field of work is the audiovisual sector, the impact of AI, beyond the processes specific to a Legal & Business Affairs department, is proving to be radical. We must bear in mind that the impact of Generative AI on content creation, especially in the context of VFX and the creation of realistic content (both animation and live-action), has raised a challenge regarding its legal viability from an intellectual property rights perspective. This prompts reflection, among other things, on whether intellectual property rights arise in works generated entirely or partially by AI. But it does not only impact the generation of audiovisual content; it goes much further. Its impact extends, for example, to the generation of musical content, which is generating significant controversy regarding, for instance, the creation of music synchronized with audiovisual content (which may lead to a shift away from original music created by musicians) or the generation of virtual music stars. This impact also extends to dubbing, which, today, can be done in other languages based on the actor’s original voice, or even to the automated generation of scripts for long-running series or children’s content. All of this, along with the question of what should be considered original or not — and, above all, the sources used to train these generative AIs and the potential legal conflict that could arise from generating content based on other content subject to intellectual property rights — opens up a fascinating debate in which we are currently immersed in the audiovisual sector