About

The legal team of ISS Facility Services is mostly structured by legal specialisations, with some of those subjects managed locally due to the specifics of the different jurisdictions of Spain and Portugal regarding labour, contracts and commercial or public matters. The department is made up of nine lawyers and one paralegal, with four based in Spain, fully dedicated to Spanish labour matters, including not only legal advice but also litigation. Other team members include one other lawyer based in Portugal with a more generalist profile, directly dealing with labour matters, contracts and commercial law, while also helping with the implementation of data protection and compliance actions. ‘One of the drivers that has had a great influence to the legal team in these two years is the relevant increase of people employed by ISS Iberia, from a number of around 32,000 to almost 40,000 this year, as a result of new service contracts gains, the expansion in new businesses in different parts of the Iberian peninsula and the development of new services in both hard maintenance and capital projects in the real estate sector’, says head of legal and compliance Iberia, Diego Enjuto Jareño. This has required the need for a fast adaptation to all of the changes and to the important increase of matters to be managed by the legal areas, both in number of issues and complexity. In addition to this, the definition of areas of responsibility has been key, with each lawyer managing the matters where they have maximum specialisation. This has allowed not only for team members to develop skills and specialist knowledge, but provided an opportunity to work together on complex matters, making the team increasingly multidisciplinary. The legal team at ISS Iberia has been recently involved in many important cases and transactions, both locally and cross-border with other countries where ISS Group does business or directly with the group headquarters in Copenhagen. It has assisted on contracts with customers such as ANA Aeroportos, Airbus, Accenture, Indra, International Paper, Merlin Properties, Repsol, Cepsa, AENA, Metropolitano Lisboa, BASF, Henkel and Rodamco. According to Enjuto, the legal team ethos can be summed up as: ‘First class legal service partnering with the business to help transforming challenges into opportunities – this can only be developed through a team of lawyers who share their passion for an excellent work and utmost care for every detail in every task they perform, embracing change as a real opportunity for development regarding both the legal area and themselves as true members of the area’.