About

Managing 33 lawyers across a number of jurisdictions, Nieves García Lopez heads all legal support across SPAI (Spain, Portugal, Africa and Israel) operations of Accenture. She joined Accenture’s legal department in 1998, assuming her current role in 2006. One of her top priorities was to increase the number of in-house lawyers and to organise the legal support in line with the legal systems, languages and cultural similarities of the countries she supervises. ‘To this respect Spain provides support to North Africa, Portugal to Angola, Mozambique and other Portuguese speaking countries, and we cover sub-Saharan countries from South Africa’ she adds. García Lopez has taken wide-reaching initiatives to increase the understanding of compliance and risk assessment among the non-legal staff. ‘The recognition of Accenture as one of the world’s most ethical organisations is a reward to our unconditional position as regards to compliance. Risk management has become one of the factors systematically included in our approach to the contracting process and it is recognised as such and acted upon by the engagement teams that conduct the negotiations. This facet of our approach has enabled the company to maintain consistency in our offerings to our clients, the risks that we can take and the ones we cannot, and to maintain the balance between risk and reward’. Sitting on the executive committee, García Lopez’s influence stretches far beyond the purely legal, to strategic decision making. Giving particular importance to diversity and equality, she proudly says that 50% of her legal team are women.