Team size:  13  

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

During the last year, the legal, regulatory and compliance division of Athens Exchange Group has faced various challenges which it has managed to overcome successfully. During the group’s transition due to the change in the upper management after almost 15 years, the division has undertaken to collect and coordinate the management as well as the business owners’ needs creating, in some cases even from scratch, the necessary framework, regulation and even process to that end. At the same time, the legal team was growing, while separating and compartmentalising the various aspects of its operations (legal, regulatory and compliance). 

The most challenging tasks the legal division encountered was to make the team work efficiently, while allowing an adequate period of adjustment for the new members, and to provide the upper management and business owners high response and quality legal services. Both challenges have been successfully overcome due to the team’s reinvention of responsibilities as well as its collaboration. 

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? 

The team has been divided into five sub-teams, which engage separately with the following issues: compliance, legal support of corporate operations, regulatory projects, corporate law and corporate governance, and strategic and development projects. This allocation of projects has offered the team the flexibility to get acquainted with the group’s needs in each sub-team, allowing for the provision of exceptional legal services, while becoming one of the company’s most important strategic partner. 

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 efforts to service the management and our business partners as a state-of-the-art legal partner, we have cooperated with various firms and external lawyers. The selection is always based on their professional expertise and fame, their proven experience on the matters we would like to assign, as well as on their take on issues that represent the core values that ATHEX Exchange Group cherishes and supports. Integrity, professionalism, transparency, respect, equity and responsibility are the main criteria that we take into account along with their activities and operations within the ESG framework.