Team size: 104  
 
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 expense?  
 
In the recent past, the Greek debt crisis has caused an avalanche of non-performing loans and other non-performing exposures with borrowers spread across the country covering all types of business and retail financing. This meant that the bank urgently needed to have a legal presence even in the most remote peripheral areas of Greece to protect its interests due to the fragmented Greek judicial system. To avoid increasing the already large number of in-house lawyers, we produced a hub-and-spoke development model, by authorising six in-house lawyers living in large regional centres as ‘district managers,’ who were then responsible for the outsourcing and monitoring of legal cases to a network of local law offices with uniform pre-agreed pricing. In this way, we have managed to keep the extensive legal network flexible, optimise costs, and maintain a network of local legal presence in all regions of the country.  
 
What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?  
 
Over the past year, our legal team has been involved with several major corporate transactions. These include handling multi-billion NPE securitisations in the HAPS program, the sale of non-core assets through spin-offs, mandatory tender offers on stock exchanges, securing financing for well-known borrowers, and successfully defending the bank against lawsuits and shareholder activism in various subsidiaries.  
 
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?  
 
Piraeus Bank has an established corporate culture, and our values must be communicated to all stakeholders, including outsourced legal service providers. In addition to the traditional values typically expected of external law firms – integrity, accountability, and transparency – in recent years we have expanded our criteria to include more ESG aspects such as diversity and green transition initiatives.  
 
All things being equal, law firms that have embraced these values will enjoy a competitive advantage over others that have not. Professional excellence has always been and will remain the primary factor, the aforementioned corporate values act more like a filter to distinguish the best among the many excellent law firms in the market.  
 
Our legal department collaborates with pre-approved external law firms across various legal fields, including corporate, shipping, retail, mortgages, and energy. These partnerships undergo a review every 24 months to consider adding new firms or removing underperformers. Compliance with fundamental values such as transparency, integrity, and professional ethics is always a major driver for potential changes in the panels.