About

Javier Vives, legal affairs director at Ford España, describes the ethos of his team as, people ‘working together to deliver competitive advantage through world class legal services to enable Ford to achieve sustainable automotive and mobility leadership’. Vives leads a small team of three; a legal affairs director, a legal affairs manager and the legal affairs officer (who is a non-qualified lawyer), and despite a ‘very limited’ budget which put constraints on the team they are proven in terms of being both business enablers and revenue producers. Highlighting the team’s work on many significant transactions that have had a positive impact on company revenue streams, Vives can point to the saving of ‘millions of euros in logistic costs’ in the seven years that came after a ‘complex negotiation processes’ with the authorities and the internal international team. Competition cases in both Spain and Portugal have also been important to the company, and the legal team has worked on a refinancing agreement that has ‘significantly reduced losses’ and assisted on a recovery of ‘several millions of euros’. Also able to impress via their outstanding innovation, the Ford España legal team was able to devise a creative solution involving the provision of Spanish insolvency law that was ‘mostly unknown and unused by the legal community’. Adding to its remit when the team became responsible for the legal matters of Ford Lusitana, the Portuguese affiliate of the company in 2014, the team is a key cog in Ford’s Europe-wide legal support function as they work ‘side by side’ with their legal colleagues across the continent and ‘leverage the international resources that we have at Ford as much as possible’. This evinces the team’s collaborative ability and dedication to being a fully-embedded part of the Ford business in an international sense.