‘After ten years working as an associate lawyer in the M&A department of Cuatrecasas in Madrid, I decided to make a turn in my professional career and in November 2016 I joined the legal department of Cintra’, explains Cristina Álvarez Fernández when discussing how she first came to the in-house legal sector. As head of the company’s Europe legal department, she was required to set up the company’s legal function from scratch, and ‘had to dig deep to understand the company’s business and its legal framework’ to achieve this. Luckily, having ‘worked closely with some of the top lawyers in [the] US’ she had a vast array of technical legal and organisational skills to inform her strategy for achieving the integration of the Cintra legal team.

She reports that she has been ‘dealing with the legal issues relating to the financing of projects located in Europe’ as part of the overall legal function, which previously was handled by a dedicated team. ‘It didn’t make much sense for me to have a separate team working on the financing of a project, I always thought that it was better that the same team dealing with the whole project, would also be in charge of its financing’, she explains. As well as this, Álvarez is keen to gain any competitive advantage she can from forward-thinking policies, including the use of cutting-edge technologies: ‘I have encouraged an internal analysis and research on the current developments of the artificial intelligence in the legal field. We have identified a few tools that could ease the work of the legal department. If we can implement these tools successfully, this will result in economic savings for the company and will help to allocate the resources of the department more efficiently’. A successful people-manager, Álvarez believes the most important characteristics an in-house counsel can possess are ‘proactivity, problem-solving abilities and a keen business orientation’.