About

Lucia Capotondi joined Giuseppe Zanotti as general counsel in 2014, and immediately set about modernising and revamping the legal department of the group. The international luxury shoe brand required a more international focus, as well as needing a digital and communication update. She worked on business acquistions in China, UAE and Japan and the openings of several retail stores, and started a digitisation process following all of its legal aspects such as ecommerce, CRM, omni-channel, social media, and digital marketing activities. She also structured cobranding projects with celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez. Capotondi also handles compliance topics, and dealt with a very sensitive litigation, which had potential to adversely affect the brand identity of the group. In her work, Capotondi emphasises the connection between legal and business areas of the company and always strives to bring the legal function as closely as possible to the business. She says that in-house lawyers ‘need to become business partners’ and that a ‘lawyer is able to see, give inputs and avoid legal problems in all aspects of daily operations’. In order for her to achieve this within the company she enacted a number of measures to improve the time and manner of the performance of services from the legal team. The insertion of legal checks in company decision making processes may have worried colleagues in other departments at the beginning, but a way of communicating and segregation of roles and responsibilities has improved the accountability process according to Capotondi. She identifies that, ‘the most challenging task is to render simple a complex legal argument and provide an understandable summary of the steps to be taken which is clear and complete also for non-legal experts audience’. She has built in-depth knowledge of the sector and built a reputation for excellence that allows her to lead this team through its development.