What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in? 

To give a little context to my answer, our department works with the licensing area throughout the airport perimeter. This means that it works with issuing and managing authorizations for all spaces in airports, whether hangars, stores or offices and cargo terminals. 

Regarding cases and transactions, I wouldn’t say we had a main one or one that stands out from the others. What we had was a mega operation of reassessment and readjustment of all authorisations following the pandemic. It was something quite challenging and interesting because all existing authorisations at airports, whether visible or not, needed to be readjusted because individuals were unable to maintain the licensing conditions. With this came a readjustment that had to have a legal basis and be materialised in several operations. During the pandemic, one of the exceptions to the legislative madness during that period was the continued operation of shops and restaurants at airports – a major exception to the legislation. That meant that our legal department was very active and busy during this time, as we had over one hundred different licenses to work on to guarantee that every store or restaurant allowed to be opened, had the proper paperwork to normally function. This process had a very large operational part, in terms of the commercial area, and then it was necessary to assemble these commercial options, make them adjust to the legal obligations and the needs of the holders and with the powers of authority that ANA has. 

The unusual business environment created by the pandemic has been swiftly followed by other shocks. Are you now putting more emphasis on preparing for the unforeseen and, if so, what does this entail? 

Regrettably, things remain as they were before the pandemic. For a simple reason: legal services are a bit the end of the line, that is, we are responsible for operationalising what are previously defined management options. Our ability to prevent or do something different is still limited, as we work with what we are given, and it is colleagues from other areas who can choose to make a difference. Naturally, from a legal point of view, we always try to open the widest possible spectrum of solutions for our partners. In this regard, we have a perspective of operationalising, materialising and being able to guarantee the greatest number of solutions and the feasibility of those solutions. 

Why are in-house lawyers well-placed to drive change within their organisations?  

I think that in this respect, there is work being done by the legal services management, in the sense of giving more and more importance and essentiality to our work, and there is no doubt that our department is a structural and essential part in the management of the other departments and the decisions of the executive committee. There is a DNA of always considering issues from a legal point of view. Of course, there will be issues of non-compliance, because sometimes our business partners want to do things one way and then it’s the legal department that must keep expectations within what is allowed by regulations. It is very rare for our partners to go ahead with something without our advice. There are several levels of decision making and we are involved in all of them. All departments within ANA ask for our support for any joint assessment, so in that regard there is a very successful teamwork.