Reflecting on her time at the Portuguese arm of Samsung, legal counsel manager Carla de Abreu Lopes says, ‘these last 6 years have allowed me to grow and develop my legal and managerial skills in areas other than competition law and contracts – now also including privacy and data protection, IT, IP and company law’.

Upon joining the multinational electronics company Lopes set about creating the local legal and compliance functions of the company, and remarks, ‘this was both a challenge and an adventure, but the results started coming quickly. As I started raising awareness to legal and compliance issues, the company became more and more interested and the added value of legal in risk prevention was increasing every day’. As part of this task, she prepared contract templates for the contracts with clients and vendors and implemented internal policies with the aim to ensure compliance with applicable law. In recognition her success, within a year of joining she was internally awarded with the “Best Support Award” reinforcing one nominators praise for her as being ‘a great communicator, pragmatic and at the same time very structured and thorough’.

Proud of the team she has created, Lopes says ‘it is fortunate to see that, while delegating the legal work and providing inputs, the lawyers with whom I am working also grow, and in the end, the team is providing better services to the company’. Most recently, Lopes assisted on the sale of Samsung’s printing division to HP which was finalised in November 2017. Prior to Samsung, she worked for ten years at top law firm Garrigues which provided her with ‘the structure needed to address the “in-house” client’. A talented individual, Lopes can speak four languages, namely Portuguese, Spanish, English and French.