How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crises, and how does your legal strategy align with the broader business strategy to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

Lawyers are used to work in crises more than everything else. Whenever a situation is very complicated and a problem difficult to resolve, we say it is ‘a lawyer’s paradise’.

Of course, this does not mean that lawyers are trying to get involved in difficult situations. On the contrary, exactly because legal counsel understand the difficulties of crises, they are trying to prevent them and the best way to achieve that is to have close daily contact with management and employees. In this way, the legal team is one of the first teams that will know that the company is heading towards instability or a crisis and is able to quickly agree with the CEO the immediate or medium-term course of action. Afterwards the members of the legal team, each one of them in the area of their specialisation and with the assistance of external counsel, learn everything there is to know about the problem that needs to be resolved and propose the action to be taken. Their proposals are discussed with me and if needed with the other members of the team and the course of action is agreed and swift implementation follows. In parallel, once in a month, the CEO is fully informed through one-to-one meetings. If the period of instability or crises are prolonged, the legal meetings with all the members of the legal team and the meetings with management become more frequent to achieve full alignment with corporate strategy.

What emerging technologies do you see as having the most significant impact on the legal profession in the near future, and how do you stay updated on these developments?

There is no doubt that AI is the single most important factor that already impacts and will also impact more and more the legal profession in the future. In five years, the legal counsel will have to explain to management their opinion compared to an AI created opinion and in ten years there will be judicial decisions based on AI applications especially in cases where the decision must be taken only based on the submitted documentation such as payment orders. Legal translations are already performed by AI translation applications. I have requested to the CEO to allow the installation on all computers of the legal team an AI application and such application will be installed as soon as internet security is satisfied with the level of protection of our data. The successful legal counsel of the future will be the ones who will master the use of AI in order to increase their speed and efficiency.

How do you prioritise diversity and inclusion within your legal department, and what initiatives have you implemented to foster a more inclusive and equitable work environment?

In Fraport Greece we appoint lawyers only based on their qualifications, competencies and attitude. This has led to a legal team made up of five females and two males. Recently two members of the legal team had to take maternity leaves of nine months at the same time, and this was a challenge for the rest of us. For this reason, we decided that every time that a member of the legal team has to take maternity or paternity leave, the company will request from external law firms to provide lawyers to work in-house for a limited time in order to support the legal team. In this way, the legal team will make maternity and paternity leave a regular thing, thus supporting family creation and allow parents to fulfill their parental role without fearing that this will have a detrimental impact on the legal team and the company.