About

Patrizia Marraghini, head of the international legal department at Keolis and member of the International Board, understandably looks to recruit lawyers with extensive multi-national experience to her in-house legal team. Keolis has extensive and growing operations internationally, especially in regards to rail and tramway operations. ‘I have quite a lot of nationalities within the team’, Marraghini explains, ‘and they are very often people with dual nationality that have lived and worked in a number of countries’. The experience of living and working in other nations and cultures is a major attribute within the team, as Marraghini explains: ‘We are often dealing with 20 or more countries at once, so it is important to have an open minded view and understanding of different national structures’. On top of this, the legal team prizes those who can contribute ‘a very strong technical legal background, including those who have completed barrister qualifications, as international lawyers should have a great preliminary background, even for a junior lawyer’. The team also looks for great diversity in terms of the type of legal work encountered. ‘It is important for our lawyers to have faced different questions, including public, civil and criminal law throughout their career’, she says, ‘because as we deal with so many aspects of the law a great variety of expertise is required’. Indeed, this expertise has been called on increasingly in recent months: ‘We are currently dealing with very exciting projects in Saudi Arabia and Sweden, and the metro of Shanghai project that we have been involved in has been particularly interesting. Moreover, we are involved in the development of projects from the very preliminary stage and are very close to business and financial matters, therefore we have a global view of the main aspects of the business’.