Team size: 22   

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?   

It is not actually an innovation I personally came up with, but a practice adopted and developed by our legal team as part of the Legal Services of the Bank and the Corporate Banking sector that we legally support, and it concerns the monitoring of legal engagements’ outsourcing and contracts in the context of corporate finance transactions. 

The contractual documents of these transactions, due to their complexity and the nature of the clients involved, are tailor made and drafted either internally by our team or by external law firms. We call this practice we implemented “high level review process” and it is applied in cases where, for the legal support of a corporate finance transaction, an external law firm is engaged. Instead of a full review of the whole documentation produced by the external law office or the non-review at all of any such documentation, our team’s high-level review is limited only to the first drafts of all documents and to the legal opinions obtained for the transaction. This process ensures the alignment of finance documents drafted by external law-firms with the Bank’s legal policies on loans and security, while not delaying the process of granting a loan and not duplicating legal work as in case of full review of all drafts of the documentation. 

Moreover, this process assures that some important terms of all corporate banking finance contracts of the Bank contain substantially the same provisions irrespective of who holds the pen, as well as it helps the internal legal team solve administrative and systemic problems arising in any stage of the drawdown procedure, which cannot be dealt by the external lawyer. Finally, the internal legal team is not isolated from important transactions which may be outsourced.  

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

Over the past year, one of the most important tasks our team had to accomplish was the legal support for the granting of corporate loans by the Bank with funds of the recovery and resilience fund (RRF). Our team was engaged in drafting finance contracts and supporting documents in accordance with the RRF rules, as well as consulting on and supporting the new procedures and controls the bank had to implement for this purpose. The bank was very prompt in unlocking the 2nd and 3rd instalments of the RRF funds from the Greek government, which presupposed, among others, the execution of respective finance contracts with the clients, among others, in the green and digital pillars of the RRF; this was the result of hard work and joint efforts of many units of the Bank to which our team significantly contributed. 

Moreover, we were involved in the legal support of landmark project finance transactions in the renewables and construction sectors, as well as in important commercial real estate and hotels’ projects, leveraged transactions and buy-outs.  The results achieved by corporate banking (structured finance, shipping, large corporate and commercial banking) over the past year were exceptional and we are proud that our internal legal team has contributed to these results.  

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 my view, the collaboration with external lawyers who align with the internal legal team’s policies and the Bank’s values is very important; it might be of equal importance as the legal expertise they offer. This is one of the characteristics that we seek for both in the law firms that we currently co-operate with, as well as when we consider new options of co-operation with different external lawyers.