Team size: 32
Major legal advisers: Garrigues, Clifford Chance, PwC and Gómez-Acebo & Pombo

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

There has been a wide variety of issues where the legal team has been involved in 2021, affecting all our practice areas: real estate, commercial, data protection, corporate, litigation and compliance. We have taken part in over 150 new store openings and carried out an M&A project consisting in the acquisition of the 100 percent share capital and voting rights of a competitor that represented the incorporation of 172 stores and two logistic platforms to the Carrefour’s network. We have been extremely busy in searching for new logistic platforms all over the country aiming to help our online business to grow in the coming years. We also participated in a data valorisation project of our loyalty program which has more than 8,000,000 members. With the focus on GDPR, antitrust (including e-learning modules) and ethics matters, more than 500 employees were trained with the topics across 23 sessions that were held face to face through our ‘virtual campus,’ and more than 5,300 newcomers were trained by using a ‘motion design’ included in the ‘welcoming pack.’

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

The key to strong relationship between business and legal departments is to liaise with each other from the beginning of strategy and decision-making processes. Being proactive is not ‘surprising’ your business partners but providing them with necessary tools and solutions. For instance, legal tech arises as a wonderful tool to add value to the company. In 2021, up to 170.000 documents have been automatically provided to the final users of the business units, without the participation of any lawyer, by using our self-empowered smart contract tool containing more than 940 templates; it was designed and controlled by the legal team, more than 600 of them was approved to be used without an extra supervision. I am proud of the internal and external recognition of our efforts in automation and legal tech: our legal team was shortlisted by the Financial Times Europe Awards, in September 2021, in the category of ‘Innovative Lawyers’.

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

We must catch up with the events and the regulation change. Whilst analysing new regulations and legislation, in-house counsel are required to give prompt and commercially aware advice to their colleagues. Our role as in-house lawyers can be described as AC/DC converters: transforming complicated legal advice, the ‘old fashioned’ legal opinions into plain English written in ‘email’ or even ‘WhatsApp language.’