About

Antonio Benítez-Donoso Tarascón started his career as a lawyer in 2004 at one of Spain’s largest law firms, Uria Menendez. After six months in the corporate department, he switched to the litigation department where for almost four years he says he ‘laid the foundation for my future career’. At this time his work focused on both conventional litigation and arbitration, where he contributed to the defence of two of Spain’s largest companies in a case against a North African national petroleum company – ‘one of Europe’s biggest arbitrations in value at stake ever’, says Benítez-Donoso. He then moved to Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, where a combination of circumstances led him to change the focus of his work from litigation and arbitration to insolvency. After a number of other roles in private practice he decided to extend his knowledge and experience as an in-house counsel and undertook a position at Accenture. There, he was part of a specialised team of five lawyers located throughout Europe, in London, Paris, Vienna and Madrid managing diverse cases of litigation and compliance matters. In 2015 he moved to Luxembourg looking for a new career challenge to further expand his skills and knowledge. ‘It proved to be the start of a new era from a personal point of view, and the change to a completely new location was also a new challenge to navigate’, says Benítez-Donoso. In 2016 he started working as a legal counsel for Talkwalker, a medium-sized technology company with around 100 employees in Luxembourg and New York. In the summer of 2016, he was approached by KPMG Luxembourg: ‘The challenge of creating an in-house legal team from scratch in a fast-changing 1,600 employee firm was very appealing’, he states. Benítez-Donoso admits that his time at KPMG has been both the most difficult and the most rewarding of his career, as he was required to start an in-house legal team from scratch in a business that relied heavily on the support of external counsel. ‘Fortunately, two main factors contributed to my ability to establish a working legal department. First, I benefited from the full support of management, who not only entrusted me with the responsibility of taking care of legal support, but counted on my advice and encouraged other partners and staff to do the same’, says Benítez-Donoso. The second was the advent of GDPR which led to an internal analysis that allowed him to meet and work with very different stakeholders and to provide them a service that they valued. Since then, the legal team has continued to grow, as well as his skills and responsibilities. He was appointed privacy liaison in a role similar to data protection officer and has been given responsibilities for the “Know-Your-Customer” and anti-money laundering processes, with another team of four members.