About

Flor Grinberg started working at Google in April 2010 as the first commercial legal counsel for Spain and Portugal. Currently, as senior legal counsel, she supports a wide range of business areas in Spain and Portugal, advising senior management, business clients and US legal teams on various aspects of Spanish and Portuguese law and negotiating commercial agreements covering a broad scope of Google’s products. During her five year in-house career at Google, Grinberg has navigated some major deals. Examples include the deal with Real Madrid for the creation of a YouTube channel and the launch of the Google Cultural Institute in Spain, as well as the deal with Reina Sofia Museum and the Spanish Ministry of Culture that allowed their pieces of art to be included in this new service. ‘However, there was one particular deal that I negotiated and closed which I believe, because of its complexity, was my biggest achievement: the BBVA deal’, she comments. In 2012 Google persuaded the Spanish banking giant BBVA to switch its software to Google’s range of enterprise software. ‘BBVA is a global financial services group founded in Spain. They have over 110,000 employees in more than 30 countries across the world. Back in 2011 we signed a global deal to migrate their business to Google for Work, Google’s cloud computing service. This deal was highly strategic and key to close not only because it was the biggest Google for Work deal that was ever signed, but also because it was a customer from the banking industry, a sector that is highly regulated and with high security standards. The BBVA deal set a milestone for our cloud computing services’. Commenting on the biggest challenges she has faced throughout her in-house career at Google, Grinberg highlights the gaps in the regulation for innovative technological products. ‘20th century laws don’t always solve 21st century problems, and as senior legal counsel at Google I am required to take innovative approaches for tackling some of the toughest legal challenges of the information age. On a daily basis we need to tackle unanswered legal questions and create new precedents. The launch of Google products and services in Spain and Portugal – Google Books, Google Play, Google+ or Google Cultural Institute to name a few – raised challenging questions that demanded creative and practical answers. Those challenging questions are raised with each single launch of our products and services’.