About

Itaú Unibanco, the largest bank in South America and 16th largest bank globally by market value (with revenue for 2016 totalling $50bn), maintains a formidable legal department in order to deal with the myriad challenges that the company faces. With 450 lawyers in the legal function, Itaú Unibanco retains one of the largest in-house legal forces in the world, but given the depth of talent available to the team, it is not just a matter of quantity over quality. Vice president – legal Claudia Politanski goes into the team’s structure: ‘While for labour and consumer legal matters we are one of a kind, we divide ourselves into a consulting group and a litigation group, for these matters, and have undergone major innovations in both of these areas. For instance, for litigation we have taken the approach that we should industrialise the process of consumer disputes, and have honed this to a fine degree to the point where disputes have been reduced 20% overall’. Innovation is at the heart of all that the Itaú Unibanco legal team does, and Politanski explains that this is excellent in attracting the best young legal talent available. ‘When our consulting team is thinking about how to structure a product from a legal standpoint, we talk to consumer protection agencies, the primary regulator and many other relevant parties to come up with a way of approaching legal matters that create market trends. This is one of the reasons individuals are attracted to us. We have taken the responsibility for organising the market in terms of legal risk’, she explains. Given the level of talent that Itaú Unibanco can attract, the team is able to be selective about who is admitted to its ranks, and prizes those who have financial and banking expertise in addition to legal skills. ‘We have always looked for extremely talented people who have done their legal training in top law schools’, Politanski explains, ‘but once they come to work with us we are very much concerned with their overall knowledge, as we believe that for working in a bank it does not suffice just to be a lawyer. You have to understand how the banking system works, how the accounting system works, advanced quantitative skills and other areas that set us apart from most in-house legal professionals’.