Patrizia Marraghini describes the department she heads as a ‘multi-national team of different personalities’ representing the interests of major transportation company Keolis, with ten individuals based in Paris and ten further located abroad under her management. Marraghini’s responsibility in terms of projects are also wide-ranging, and she travels regularly to 18 infrastructure projects around the world, but alongside this, she has been undertaking ‘new work on shareholders agreements, new partnerships consolidated and new financial projects based around PPP’.

Her impact on the company’s commercial side has also grown in recent years. ‘I am also a member of the audit committee for legal and commercial, and am contributing more on the business side of things; I am often asked to intervene in global matters and on global projects’, she explains. Her strategy for dealing with new jurisdictions internationally is to get as much information from local partners as possible: ‘For new countries, the first thing I do is to find a local partner to discuss and to understand the local context in order to sign preliminary agreements, which we then use as a basis for future ones’.

Her advice for in-house lawyers less far into their journey than her is ‘to be open minded, and try to find as much mitigation as possible within the business. The target is not to have a perfect business but to have an operational one. Do not refuse to work if you find risk. Instead, try to find a solution to the problem’.