Having completed her legal education in Germany at Frankfurt’s Goethe University, Natalia Bódalo Lozano initially began her legal career within law firms in the country. This portion of her career lasted for ten years and culminated in a five-year tenure with Gleiss Lutz of Frankfurt. Returning to Spain in 2001, she worked for Ashurst in Madrid at first before moving into the in-house legal world with global energy company Repsol.

She originally joined Spanish multinational oil and gas company CEPSA in 2003 and has worked there ever since, taking on her current role as head of the exploration and production (E&P) legal department in 2014. Alongside taking on head of legal responsibilities for the division and the company’s acquisition of the Coastal Group, Bódalo mentions her work on the project team for the construction of the MEDGAZ submarine pipeline as a particular career highlight. ‘This project gave me the possibility of working very closely with the technical, commercial, finance and operational elements of the business and an understanding of the importance of operational planning and the impact of a well drafted contract’, she explains.

Bódalo has worked hard to expand the capabilities of her legal team, creating ‘an organisation that gives legal support to each of the business units within the E&P area’, through her championing of ‘high quality legal advice’ and ‘involvement in projects from the beginning’. In her opinion, ‘a top-quality in-house counsel has the ability to provide practical and adequate legal solutions for the business, always in accordance with the laws and preserving the legal benefit of the company’.