About

Headquartered in Denmark, Vestas is a major wind turbine production and support company, which achieved a revenue of over €8.4bn in 2015. It is a global company, and while regional counsel and vice president of legal and contracting Alejandro García Granda is part of a team of seven in Madrid, he also oversees a total complement of 21 lawyers assigned to the Mediterranean region. García has been a key element in a comprehensive restructure of how the regional legal components report to the group legal team. In what he describes as a positive development, there is now ‘one global legal team with a change in reporting lines and we now report directly to the general counsel in Denmark’, improving coordination and mutual responses to global challenges while retaining local expertise. ‘We have re-enforced both approaches’, García explains, and when deciding between having a ’local team close to local regulations and markets or a centralised one’, they have ‘combined both: having a strong Madrid team but also a strong local team too’. García is proud of the team’s involvement in revenue generation for the company, stating that ‘the engine of the sales deals/financial results is logically the legal team’. Alongside this, he points out the diverse nature of these deals, mentioning ‘penetration of emerging markets. In 2016 we closed deals in Jordan, Jamaica and Argentina, supporting the deals and dealing with compliance too’. The team’s success can be traced to its core philosophy, which García describes as one of ‘ethics and collaboration’. On the ethical side, each team member is acutely aware of their duty both to the team and company, and what is required to maintain the utmost standards. On the collaborative side, the team is made aware that ‘it’s important to share practices, standardise templates, and share problems to allow us to work all over the world’ effectively as a team.