About

BBVA (Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria) is a multinational global financial services group founded in 1857. The Group has a strong leadership position in the Spanish market, is the largest financial institution in Mexico, it has leading franchises in South America and the Sun Belt region of the US; and it is also the leading shareholder in Garanti, Turkey’s biggest bank for market capitalisation. Irene Rodríguez Alonso is the head of intellectual property (IP), in charge of a team of four corporate lawyers, namely María Andújar, Belén Perulles, Carlos Rodríguez and Bárbara Losilla. The team is a part of the holding’s corporate legal department, managing all matters related to trademarks, domain names, copyright and patents for BBVA Group worldwide. The team has developed an in-depth legal knowledge on new technologies such as blockchain, distributed ledger technology (DLT), artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cloud services. All of which requires the lawyers to speak the language of technicians and engineers, working with their methodologies such as Agile, DevOps, Kanban to play a pivotal role in protecting the innovative technology products in accordance to laws on copyright, patents, and trade secrets. In other more “traditional” aspects of IP, the team supports the protection of the remaining BBVA Group’s intangible assets (trademarks, domain names, copyright), contractual relationships and IP-related matters with partners, providers and joint ventures. According to Rodríguez, ‘all these legal duties require a close alignment with our stakeholders and deep understanding of their activities and needs in order to develop a pragmatic approach to pre-emptive legal counselling’. The current IP team is the result of a recent merger between two separate teams, with a view to take advantage of the synergies and technical and human capital of the team members for the benefit of the BBVA Group. Summarising her team’s culture, Rodríguez states: ‘Our internal client comes first. We are agile and decisive when solving client’s problems. We put ourselves in their shoes from the beginning so we can understand their needs better. We also find new ways of doing things by innovating and testing new ideas that help us learn. We treat the bank’s objectives as our own, and we do everything in our power to achieve them. We feel empowered and fully responsible for achieving our goals as a legal team. We are passionate and enthusiastic about our job’.