Could you share an example of a time when you came up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works and did not come at a large cost?  

In our company we need to deal with many agreements daily. Most of them are quite material and need to be monitored on a tactical basis, so that we do not miss any deadline regarding their termination or renewal. Taking into consideration the above serious need, which we were trying to cover with a big effort – noting down the expiration/termination dates of the agreements, adding alerts in our agendas etc. -, my partner in the legal department and I thought of discussing the matter with our IT director, so that we could find a solution internally. We presented, therefore, our ideas about a system, based on the already installed programs in our PC systems. So, we came up with a system – called DMS Portal -, which sends daily alerts to myself, my colleague, and the director, who is responsible for each agreement, and reminds us of any possible important date, which needs to be taken into consideration. And it is worth mentioning that such a system was installed with the minimum possible cost for the company.     

What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?   

The last two years, among others, we had to deal with a couple of significant transactions, which needed several discussions and deep involvement of the legal department -the one transaction is still ongoing. These collaborations referred to products that have a very important position among the company’s products and contribute significantly to the company’s profit. We needed to re-negotiate specific terms of our existing cooperation or to expand the cooperation in new pillars. Everything turned out well for our company and we are very happy and proud that we, as the legal team, were part of these transactions.     

How important is choosing to work with external lawyers who align with your company’s values? Are you likely to reconsider what firms you work with based on this?  

In our company, we attach great importance to the observance of policies related to ethics, morality, etc. For this reason, we make sure to choose our external partners, at all levels and sectors, with the same parameters that we set also internally. We consider it particularly important that all existing external lawyers, with whom we have been working for several years, follow, in any case, policies corresponding to those of our company.