About

Responsible for managing all legal affairs including the company’s representation before courts and arbitral panels, reviewing the company’s contractual engagements, handling issues related to its customers, and managing external law firms, the ELPEDISON legal department is characterised by ‘solid teamwork and a hands-on approach’ according to legal director Marios Andrikopoulos. It also operates in close cooperation with the legal departments of all shareholder companies, maintains a very extensive network of external legal contacts to assist it in its duties, and recently added company data protection officer responsibilities to its remit in compliance with its GDPR framework. Clearly, the team’s standard workload is diverse and highly complicated even before specific project work is taken into account. On this front, the team has been equally busy, with Andrikopoulos reporting that the winning of a crucial judiciary case in the last few months and the team’s successful handling of the company’s refinancing in September 2018 as among its most impressive achievements. However, these are just the tip of the iceberg in what has been an extremely successful period for the team. When discussing the team culture that has been the basis for this, Andrikopoulos speaks very highly of the prevailing team environment: ‘We excel as lawyers both in knowing the law and applying it. We protect the interests of ELPEDISON and advise efficiently while contributing to its progress and ensure data protection and customer protection in the process, all the while improving and maintaining legal skills at a high level’. An extremely strict commitment to compliance also safeguards the company and its customers at all levels as well. ‘The company is active within a heavily regulated sector, meaning the legal department’s intervention and coverage is vital to all sections of the company’, Andrikopoulos says. ‘As such, we place equal importance both to cross-checking our actions and advice and to passing and preserving a sentiment of legal security to the top management and to the rest of our colleagues of the other divisions and departments’.