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Chief legal officer Calliopi Nicolaidou is clear that each of the 19 members of the Hellenic Bank in-house legal team ‘have added substantial value to the work of the team’. She stressed that ‘while senior lawyers are also responsible for the management of the team’s workload and responsible to ensure delivery of support to the Bank in a structured and prompt way, junior lawyers also take on work individually and are often involved in transaction work or work independently on regulatory projects and policy matters for the Bank, allowing the team to be more efficient while also allowing the juniors to be more motivated’. Recent years have seen a root-and-branch reorganisation of the way the team is structured, in order to see it more efficiently serve the needs of Hellenic Bank. ‘Members of the legal team were separated into five teams, with subject matters allocated to each team who then were made responsible for caring for a part of the business’. In addition, fees are now stringently recorded and reviewed every quarter to examine how these can be controlled, while a greater emphasis on interpersonal relations has allowed the team to ‘become more aware of each other’s work, understand how work streams interact and provide a more consistent approach across the business’. Among other deals that the team has been involved in over recent months, Nicolaidou mentions the acquisition of loans and deposits from the ex-Cyprus Cooperative Bank as one of the most memorable and indicative of the team’s excellent qualities. ‘The portfolio acquired was more than double the size of the Hellenic Bank portfolio’, she explains. ‘The legal team was involved from day one, including in structuring discussions, regulator discussions, due diligence exercise, negotiation of the business transfer agreement and the transitional services agreement, and finally also involved in the capital raise for €150m the bank is currently undergoing which was a condition for the approval of the acquisition by regulatory authorities’. The team has also showed itself to be extremely adaptable, as Nicolaidou highlights: ‘The team has recently been merged with members of the ex-Cyprus Cooperative Bank team further to an acquisition by Hellenic of its banking business. The ease with which the team has joined forces and thrown itself into not only day-to-day work but the integration of the two businesses has been amazing and enjoyable to live through. The way we work together to supplement and complement each other is our strongpoint’, she concludes.