Team size: Five

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

The most significant matters our legal team has been recently involved in include collaborating with different business units in securing commercial and development opportunities, while ensuring those opportunities are embedded in a strong contractual framework that clearly addresses risks, limits exposure, and complies with existing internal and external regulations.

How do you suggest in-house lawyers build strong relationships with business partners?

A key quality that internal legal teams need to possess is a thorough understanding of the business and its characteristics, as well as its objectives and competitive advantages, especially in complex, versatile industries that require significant investments to be carried out (such as the energy sector). This quality is key to not only correctly understand and address business risks, but also to commit to the business and ensure goals are achieved within an acceptable contractual and regulatory framework.

In this regard and depending on the size of the company and the sector in which it operates, it is vital that in-house lawyers understand their role as “doers”. There is no business opportunity without associated risks, and understanding how the industry and business works helps in making certain decisions regarding acceptable and unacceptable risks. In-house legal teams are very well-positioned to not only lead change in certain organisations, but also to make sure that the business gets done.

Another characteristic that I believe is relevant to in-house legal teams is being versatile, pragmatic, and flexible in providing innovative solutions to the requirements that a company may have on a day-to-day basis, which often go beyond fixed solutions provided by legal theories. That requires not only a strong regulatory and commercial knowledge, but also being open to hear solutions from other business units and other members of the legal team.