Career Biography

Noelia Palacios Melle is a General Counsel and Legal Director with 17 years of post-qualified experience in corporate law and M&A. Throughout her career, she has combined deep legal expertise with a genuine business orientation, advising boards of directors, driving cross-border transactions, and building high-performing legal teams across Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece.

Noelia began her career at Uría Menéndez, one of Spain’s most prestigious law firms, where she worked in the Corporate Law Department on landmark transactions. She also gained early exposure to corporate governance at the highest level, working with listed companies .

She then moved in-house, holding senior legal roles at Samsung Electronics, where she managed a broad range of commercial and corporate matters, and at Gransolar Group, where she served as Head of Legal and Contract Management at the main subsidiary of the group, providing legal leadership for complex international projects in the renewable energy sector.

In 2020, Noelia joined the Swedish listed company Intrum as Senior Legal Counsel before being promoted to General Counsel and Legal Director, reporting to the Spanish CEO and the Swedish Chief Legal Officer. During this period she steered M&A transactions — including the acquisition of Haya Real Estate and the purchase of large portfolio investments — and negotiated high-value servicing contracts with leading financial institutions. She also served as Secretary of the Board of Directors of the group companies, including Solvia. Her contribution was recognised with a top industry award as In-House Counsel of the Year in the banks and financial institutions category in 2023.

Most recently, she served as General Counsel and Legal Director at Hipoges (KKR Group), leading a team of twelve corporate lawyers and managing legal operations across 24 companies in four countries, covering M&A, corporate governance, regulatory affairs and contract negotiation.

Having completed her role at Hipoges, Noelia looks ahead with enthusiasm to her next chapter.

Noelia holds a Double Degree in Law and Business Management from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and has completed the Programme on General Management (PDG) at IESE.

Have you had any experiences during your career as a lawyer that stand out as particularly unique or interesting?

My career has taken me across industries and borders in ways I never anticipated when I started at Uría Menéndez. One of the most memorable early experiences was advising on the incorporation of Banca Cívica, the first merger of Spanish savings banks, during one of the most turbulent moments in Spain’s financial history. Watching that transaction unfold against the backdrop of the 2008 crisis gave me a masterclass in how law and politics intersect under pressure.

From there, I took a leap that shaped my international outlook profoundly, joining Samsung Electronics. Working within a Korean corporate culture was a revelation. The discipline, the hierarchy and the collective mindset were unlike anything I had experienced in a Spanish law firm. It taught me to listen differently and to adapt.

That cultural curiosity only deepened at Gransolar, where negotiating contracts with companies from across the Arab world was truly extraordinary. Understanding different cultural approaches to negotiation, building trust across very different legal and business traditions, and finding common ground in such a unique context was one of the most enriching chapters of my career.

And through it all, what I have come to love deeply about this profession is the pure adrenaline of M&A closings, the late nights, the last-minute issues, the adrenaline rush when everything finally comes together. Brutal in the best possible way.

What ties all these experiences together is that the law never operates in a vacuum, it lives inside business reality, and that is what makes this profession endlessly fascinating to me.

Beyond your corporate responsibilities, is there a cause, within the legal profession or in wider society, that you are particularly passionate about? How does this influence your leadership style as general counsel?

I am genuinely passionate about neuroscience and its application to the corporate world. I am fascinated by how our brains work in high pressure environments, how we make decisions under stress, and what science tells us about human behaviour in negotiations and leadership.

I stumbled into this world out of pure curiosity and it has never left me. Understanding how people process information and respond to pressure has quietly influenced the way I approach my work and my interactions in the business environment.

I think the legal profession would benefit enormously from paying more attention to behavioural science. We are trained to think in terms of rules, risk and logic, but so much of what we do ultimately comes down to human beings making decisions. The more we understand that, the better lawyers we become.