About

‘PRISA is the world’s leading Spanish and Portuguese-language media group with its creation and distribution of content in the fields of culture, education, news and information, and entertainment. The 47 year old PRISA Group today has presence in 25 countries with over 8,000 employees and is divided into four business areas: education, radio, press and media capital. The Group’s general counsel and secretary of the board is at the heart of business strategy, leading the company’s cultural transformation, with the legal in-house team, plus the fiscal, central services and HR and talent management divisions reporting to him. The in-house legal team, composed of 31 lawyers, is structured into a corporate team and four legal directors corresponding to each business area reporting to the business CEO and functionally to the general counsel and secretary of the board. The team manages, supports and advises on legal areas including, but not limited to, corporate governance and responsibility, M&A, capital markets, litigation, intellectual property, compliance, data protection, antitrust and commercial contracting. This high-performance team works together with other areas of the company, with a global vision that ensures meeting company objectives and successful projects. It is a flat organisational structure, where regardless of the position everybody works side-by-side in order to provide clear and decisive answers to the increasing business demands. In order to bridge the businesses differences, the corporate team attends not only the different corporate areas needs and the corporate governance, the board and its commissions but provides support to the whole group in all M&A, capital markets and financing operations, and any other business requirements. Generosity and teamwork are the main characteristics of the legal team. The team does not have specific legal KPIs independent of those of the business, and apart from being also driven by results, the team objectives are linked to meeting the group’s objectives. Through the team’s knowledge, experience and a global vision of the businesses, strong pillars are constructed to allow sustainable growth and value creation. Regular legal committee meetings are held in order to discuss relevant matters which may have a business impact and ensure that the In-house function is collaborating in achieving business and operational goals. In spite of organisational structural changes, the stabilisation of balance sheet refinancing until 2022, the businesses diversity, the geographic dispersion and the complexity involved in the ongoing digital transformation process, the in-house team – because of its resilience and flexibility – provides a prompt and coordinated response and can anticipate risks by being aligned with the group’s strategic plan. The high resilience plus the capacity to recycle knowledge and skills allows the legal team to advance with the technological transformation that the group is now immersed in. PRISA’s digital transformation is key for the business; newspaper printing is disappearing, education through digital books, applications and programs is a fact, digital marketing is vital in its radio and press businesses. The company’s lawyers need to understand the keys of the digital business, how it evolves and who are the main actors and stakeholder of the new ecosystem. Concepts like branded content, CMP, DSP, big data and IoT must be added to the legal knowledge in order advise and contribute toward a growing and scalable digital model. Last but not least, the in-house team leads by example, with integrity and in accordance with the values and principles set out in the ethics code, being also responsible of promoting ethical behaviour of all the group staff, partners and members, through the compliance units which are headed by the legal directors. All this is done to focus on maximising PRISA’s value. The team’s most relevant 2018 achievements are: Completing all corporate and financing transactions notified to the National Securities Market Commission, the compliance of the Group with the GDPR, and the development and communication of intellectual property policies’.