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

The most significant transactions in the last years that have added an additional accomplishment to our activity have been (i) the Company’s IPO  in the Spanish Stock Exchange and (ii) the successful completion of several M&A transactions worldwide (in Spain, Chile, Poland, Mexico, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Singapore), as part of the assets rotation line of business that the Company has been pursuing in the last 2-3 years. 

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis to ensure the organisation’s resilience? 

As a team we remain flexible to adapt our activity and expertise to new areas that become more needed always with a business-minded approach and with constant focus on risk identification and mitigation, so as to give stability and reliability in a changing environment: we revisit priorities to ensure that the team refocuses on new needs and on tasks that become more important and that add more value for the company in the new circumstances, and sometimes, if needed, we reshape the team allocating resources differently to attend the new challenges. We revisit our risk profile in the different areas of our activity to ensure our strategy duly addresses the new challenges (changing regulation, new market trends, new business opportunities, difficulties or hostile environment) and work closely with the business teams to ensure the goals of the company are well understood to drive our own activity as a team. 

What strategies do you employ to ensure the successful digital transformation of a legal department while maintaining compliance with your country’s data protection laws?

 This is one of the biggest challenges we face as a legal team, but more than incorporating technological tools in our daily practice without a clear goal in mind, what requires is the definition of the purpose of incorporating new technologies that must be aligned with the company’s goals. Technological tools should help us to be more efficient in our processes, reducing time spent on mechanical or routine tasks and allowing us to use that time in becoming more creative, more innovative, and to spend our time in value added work, and also freeing up space for reflection, study, and learning through daily practice.

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

The company’s IPO process has been a challenging and enriching experience: it allowed us to gather and highlight the achievements made to reach this significant milestone while in parallel defined the new targets and the future business plan that guides us towards challenging and exciting goals, and leading that process from the legal team has been extremely interesting and enriching. But such event being a unique opportunity to stop and assess what has brought us here as a company and what will come next, I must say that my daily experience has been equally very exciting and a phantastic opportunity for my professional growth: it has been about navigating large-scale, cross-border renewable energy projects in a changing environment of regulatory, contractual and geopolitical factors. Our projects not only require our involvement and advice on contracts and applicable laws, but most importantly demands commitment, strategy, and a commercially minded approach to align different stakeholders with very different interests and timelines to make the deal viable from all points of view. 

Given Spain’s integration within the EU and its exposure to Latin America and North Africa, have recent geopolitical tensions and trade shifts changed your company’s risk profile over the past year? 

Indeed: as a multinational with presence in a large and varied set of countries (Latin America, Asia, but even some regions in Europe such as Ukraine), we are exposed to a quickly evolving landscape where the risks are becoming more complex and multifaceted and its evolution faster and thus, more difficult to predict (needless to say that, in addition, being in a highly regulated sector, our exposition to geopolitical moves is even bigger than for other economy sectors)