About

Central to development of Portugal-based project management company Grupo ProCME, the legal team is known to be a versatile team of legal and managerial professionals. Comprised of three lawyers and one non-lawyer, the Grupo ProCME legal team is led by experienced counsel Margardia Novais who is the chief of a legal department that she states is ‘involved with its legal opinion in all major decisions’ the company makes. Novais believes that the most significant contribution the team gives to the business is through the diversity of assistance provided with regards to projects throughout all stages of the process. This means that even before the project process is underway they have an input, as the team is responsible for conducting ‘intensive training’ to all directors and executive officers of the company to ensure they can ‘analyse and mitigate the contractual risks in commercial offers to clients’. In addition to this training, which shows their excellent communicative skills in educating non-lawyers on legal risks, the team also communicate the ‘impact of those risks in the contracts with subcontractors, and follow-up of the projects from a contractual perspective’, ensuring their voices are heard even after a project’s implementation. This strong integration between the team and their business partners is consolidated on a daily basis, and Novais interacts ‘very closely’ with senior management. Between 2014 and 2015 the team was asked to define the strategy and coordination of legal and contractual actions and implementations of all measures designed to ‘avoid and mitigate huge impact of the non-accomplishment of wind power projects in Brazil, due to the bankruptcy of a wind turbines provider’. Despite the Portuguese market experiencing legal and regulatory changes that have had an impact on the team, the Grupo ProCME legal team’s location at the centre of the group’s operations mean they constantly prove their worth as high-calibre legal professionals as well as outstanding business enablers.