About

The three person legal team serving the Portuguese branch of electronics giant Samsung has been an important partner to the business in recent years, earning a reputation as a positive change driver, achiever and value-adder. Carla de Abreu Lopes manages the department, reporting directly to the CEO in doing so, and explains how the team’s ability to be ‘flexible and adapt to changes in the company’s business needs’ is one of its strongest attributes. Lopes has spent seven years in the legal team and in that time, she has noted the growth in size and relevance of the department thanks to ‘the need to provide legal support to daily business requests, and in major projects’. She continues, ‘as the legal team is increasingly becoming a more relevant part of the company’s operations, our support is requested more often and this brought about the need to increase the legal and compliance team’. In-line with the team’s technology specialism, Samsung Portgual’s lawyers have been central to the company’s GDPR implementation, which has been one of its most significant recent challenges. Thanks to GDPR pervading ‘different (and almost in all) areas’ of its operations, Samsung Portugal had to ‘evaluate and adapt the systems and thus all legal and contractual frameworks needed to be updated and negotiated with vendors and customers’, demonstrating the team’s commitment and ability to work on large-scale projects. Lopes also highlights the way in which the team must renegotiate supply contracts with major customers on an annual basis, implying an ‘active collaboration and communication with several departments within the company’. The success of the team is down to its members, and in addition to Lopes, who supervises all of the team’s work, and manages the work of external law firms’ the business uses, senior legal counsel Margarida Garcia is mainly involved in commercial contracts, consumer law and litigation, whilst junior legal counsel Ana Silva is a mainly involved in consumer and advertisement law and data protection issues. Explaining the team’s ethos, Lopes explains how this is developed in tandem with that of the organisation: ‘We have now adopted a Samsung motto: “Do What You Can’t”. As a dynamic brand in a very competitive market, every day has its own new challenges. Being able to help the company to move beyond the expected brings us a sense of achievement. In our team, we assimilate it as taking the extra mile to achieve innovative solutions in the legal and compliance field’.