Team size: 25

What are the most significant cases or transactions you and your team have been involved in?

In the last two years, we have continued supporting Amazon’s growth. Our support was critical to deal with the unprecedented challenges the pandemic brought to e-commerce. We continued serving our customers’ needs and ensuring the health of our operations employees and delivery partners. We also led the legal workstream for the launch of new business categories as well as the expansion of Amazon.es and Prime services to Portuguese customers.

Finally, we have faced an increased focus of regulators on our activities in areas such as competition law, privacy, and product safety compliance. The main challenge is the untested legal grounds for several cases in competition and privacy when it relates to online activities as well as a high volume of cases.

How do you suggest in-house lawyers build strong relationships with business partners?

My legal team follows the business in a way, that each business team has a single legal point of contact. This way, we can stay intricately connected to the business needs and challenges of the units we support. We are frequently part of their business meetings, provide them with on-going training on legal issues to keep them informed. We also devote time and resources to develop self-service tools for the business to work autonomously on legal matters without the need of direct legal involvement (e.g. to run promotions or contract negotiations).

How do you feel the pandemic has changed the world of work for in-house counsel and the function of the general counsel?

From a business point of view, the pandemic has presented a shift to how we do business online, both with our end customers and with our business partners. E-commerce has increased materially, and we successfully took the opportunity to help SMEs using our marketplace to go fully digital and cope with the reduction of brick-and-mortar shopping. Both legal and business teams are now back to a hybrid model, in which we work from home more days than we work in the office. This does create some challenges to stay connected as a team and with our business clients. We make sure to work from the office when they are around and we also do team meetings, face-to-face trainings and offsite.