First joining MAXAM almost 20 years ago, general counsel, director and secretary to the board of directors Carlos Gastañaduy is a long-tenured counsel for the Spanish global technology company, having seen it develop from a local firm with few subsidiaries overseas to a large multinational group and global conglomerate.

Such growth and expansion required a large amount of M&A work, which Gastañaduy explains helped him ‘become familiar with the international corporation way of doing things and a multi-jurisdiction approach’. In terms of upcoming challenges, he highlights the role of ‘consolidation and digestion’ involving the ‘tidy up and restructuring work’ ahead of the company, as well as ‘globalisation and digitalisation’ he claims present the ‘biggest challenges’ for the company’s staff to navigate owing to the lack of previous experience in those areas. In the face of these issues, Gastañaduy has developed and changed his skills as a lawyer and viewpoints to adapt to the different realities and problems faced in each of the aforementioned challenges.

As well as his presence in the development of MAXAM’s business operations, Gastañaduy has improved and refined the internal legal department of the company; ‘my main merit was to lead or at least cooperate in changing the mentality of the in-house lawyers working with us, by helping them to move from a reactive to a proactive approach, where the lawyer has to be involved and accompany the business people from the very beginning and where the lawyer has much more many things to contribute than mere contract drafting’.

This approach has achieved recognition from management and staff, who rely on the internal legal team ‘for many things that are not legal matters strictly speaking, but [matters] to which we can contribute due to our previous experiences and related knowledge’. He is also influential in the management of the company by taking the leadership in new areas and topics, such as data protection, cybercrime, compliance programmes and social media problems, which he explains the legal team is ‘more familiar with than other staff due to the legal implications associated to those issues’. Regarding specific transactions, Gastañaduy was involved in a ‘very significant’ patent breach claim which the company was forced to bring against one of its competitors in one of the main foreign markets it operates in.

Despite ‘complexities and different inputs and outputs’ endemic in these claims, he has taken it as yet another opportunity to ‘learn a lot in this field where I had a very limited experience’. A proven expert with a number of business-enhancing results, Gastañaduy showed leadership during the negotiation and drafting of the ‘largest supply and service agreement that MAXAM has ever entered into’, in which he highlights the ‘sophisticated hardship and price adjustment clauses’.