About

The Google Spain and Portugal legal team currently has six lawyers, including five legal counsels and one legal trainee. The head of the team is María González Ordóñez as legal director, who joined Google in 2008 and oversaw the creation and expansion of the legal team in Spain and Portugal. She was appointed legal director in 2014 and now heads up and manages legal teams in the UK, Ireland, Israel, sub-Saharan Africa, in addition to Spain and Portugal. Senior legal counsel Flor Grinberg joined Google in 2010, and Grinberg advises on legal issues and risks, complex agreement structures and company policies. She has closed strategic agreements such as a cloud deal with BBVA, which was a milestone for Google’s cloud computing services, and advised on key product launches, including the launch of Google Arts & Culture in Spain. Alicia Sigüenza, senior legal counsel, is a litigation counsel with more than 12 years of experience in the field of IP and IT law. Sigüenza joined Google in 2011 and since then has been coordinating Google’s defence in a great number of litigation matters in Spain and Portugal. In recent years, the Google Spain and Portugal legal team has been involved in some significant cases. The team was deeply involved in the defence of the ground-breaking “right to be forgotten” case before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). Following the ruling in May 2014, the team worked around the clock to ensure Google’s compliance with the decision. This included the development and periodical update of internal policies to implement not only the CJEU judgment, but also the national case law derived from it. In addition, the team dealt with two lawsuits concerning Google’s keyword advertising business – AdWords (currently Google Ads) Fotoprix and La Tienda del Espía. In both cases the team obtained favourable court precedents where Spanish courts confirmed the lawfulness of Google AdWords under both trademark and unfair competition law. ‘This case law has been consolidated by the Spanish Supreme Court, where the highest court settled the lawfulness of using trademarks as keywords, both from a trademark and unfair competition viewpoint, and even recognised the value AdWords brings to ensure a competitive landscape’, says Sigüenza. The team culture is centered around protecting Google’s innovation in Iberia. As Sigüenza states ‘As legal counsel of a company at the forefront of innovation, we are constantly pushing the legal envelope to protect our products. Much of the work we do is not that different from what other in-house lawyers do, but what differentiates us is the broad and varied scope of work we handle resulting from Google’s many different products and services. The fact that we advise on cutting-edge technology requires us to think outside the box, sometimes when the box hasn’t even been invented yet’.