Could you share an example of a time when you came up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works and did not come at a large expense? 

One of the most time-consuming activities has always been the cross-checking of the original and revised versions of standard contracts which are often exchanged by the production and supply chain department (or other departments) with contracting counterparts. Sometimes the “compare” button in Word is not sufficient as the revised text may contain paragraphs being moved in the edited version with amendments which are difficult to track; besides, despite the internal training on non-revisable clauses (as they may correspond to certain non-negotiable corporate policies or local legislation), some contracts contain revisions to non-amendable clauses, thus making the negotiation and finalisation process too slow and the legal team’s work too muddled. 

Alongside the internal IT team, I came up with a contract IT format which is only partially revisable. The non-negotiable clauses cannot be amended and are protected through a sort of lock, whilst the commercial clauses and a few other clauses are open to amendment. 

Through this format we reduced the delivery time of a signable contract by half, as the legal team can immediately concentrate on the revisions which are immediately visible and which can be negotiated, whilst the other parts of the contract can remain untouched. The costs have been almost irrelevant, and the internal IT department used programming tools already in use within the company, so no additional cost was added for the implementation of the procedure. 

What are some of the main trends impacting the industry sector you work in in Italy?  

Compared to some twenty years ago, when I started working in the industry, fashion is becoming increasingly regulated.  Fashion products have witnessed a flood of new regulations in respect to the product compliance. This comes directly from the legislation within the EU which is casting an attentive and critical eye on the industry. Spurred by the rise of awareness on sustainability issues, the EU is developing at a fast pace a body of law encompassing any aspect, from a regulation establishing a framework for setting eco-design requirements for sustainable products to extended producers’ responsibility in respect the environmental impacts of the products throughout their entire product life cycle which companies must mitigate. 

New laws about packaging labelling are issued everywhere; sometimes their provisions differ from legislation to legislation, forcing legal departments of fashion houses to frantically amend internal instructions almost on a daily basis, keeping an eye on virtually every country where the fashion product is sold. 

The impact of this trend is huge, not just economically but also organisationally, since the industry must adjust its entire production process, starting from how a fashion product is conceived. This has its toll on the work of the legal department which is at the forefront in identifying new regulations and promptly pass them on to the entire organisation. 

What measures has your company taken to embed sustainability practices into its core business operations, and how does the role of the general counsel contribute to driving and ensuring sustainable practices within the company?  

This question is an immediate consequence of the previous answer, because sustainability has been by far the most important trend in fashion since before the pandemic. In 2019 we started our own path to sustainability, sometimes falling short of our targets because embedding sustainability in a company is a virtually never-ending process. We started by singling out (through a materiality analysis with the company’s stakeholders) the core sustainability issues, as we were immediately aware that sustainability could not be made in a day, and its ramifications required an accurate planning of long-term objectives. We decided to concentrate at first on the supply chain process, which posed challenges we knew would be the most difficult to disentangle. Focusing at first on the social part of the ESG acronym, we worked on a new scoring system to rank the suitable suppliers by adding, alongside the quality of the products, the timely deliveries, the economic value and other characteristics, also the social score. This score, which averages with the others, embeds the social sustainability of a supplier and is based on the data from one of the world’s largest data platforms for supply chain assessment on sustainability practices. 

As general counsel, I was in the forefront of this trailblasing process, making sure that the social scoring met the legal requirements and the ethical principles and values of the company. General counsel are key to the implementation of a sustainability programme, as ESG affects almost every domain under control of the legal department, from legal, regulatory, and compliance to risk management, corporate governance, ethics and business conduct. Much of the responsibility to transition to a more sustainable economic paradigm lays with the general counsel.