Team size: 29  

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crises, and how does your legal strategy align with the broader business strategy to ensure the organisation’s resilience?  

The priority of our legal department is to have a comprehensive understanding of the potential risks we are exposed to, in a world where legal concerns are not simply limited to traditional legal issues (such as contracts, corporate law, antitrust regulations, and intellectual property). Instead, business-related factors, including reputational risks, financial exposure, market volatility, data protection, cybersecurity threats, potential supply chain disruptions can also present significant risks with relevant legal implications. Therefore, our legal and compliance departments continuously and directly monitor legal aspects, while broader risks that could impact the business are supervised through a continuous information flow across departments and, where appropriate, among the different operating companies in the group.  Furthermore, we have worked on improving our reaction times and the legal team is actively involved in company projects from their early stages. In other words, our professionals have evolved from being solely legal technicians to strategic advisors who bring a risk-based approach to our corporate decision-making process. This enables us to provide prompt responses in case of any crisis outbreak and to define a legal strategy aligned with the broader business strategy. 

What are the main cases or transactions that you have been involved in recently?  

Our legal department has been engaged in several transactions, most of which are confidential. One of the significant initiatives we have recently undertaken is the divestment of a particular business unit. While we cannot disclose further details about the operation, we can confirm that it was a substantial transaction that required a differentiated legal expertise, extensive effort and coordination. To manage the legal aspects of the divestment process, we fully entrusted the task to the internal legal team, which possesses extensive experience and expertise in various legal areas, including M&A, contractual law, intellectual property law, and corporate law. This allowed us to have a streamlined process and swift execution while maintaining the management internally, resulting in lower costs, deep knowledge of the business unit features and optimal alignment with the different companies and departments involved in the operation. 

What role does the legal department play in promoting and ensuring corporate social responsibility in your organisation?  

As a corporate legal department, we have two distinct tasks when it comes to corporate social responsibility. Firstly, we ensure that ethical values are upheld in every process we undertake directly. Secondly, we propose and execute projects that promote ethical and responsible behaviours throughout the entire group. To better achieve these goals, we decided to create a cohesive and cooperative group legal and compliance department. By doing so, we can leverage the different skills and backgrounds of our team (managerial, legal, economic and organisational) to create policies, guidelines and behavioural standards that are stringent yet tailored to our business needs. By doing so, corporate social responsibility standards are not perceived as a constraint on business opportunities, but as an opportunity themselves. In other words, we work to make corporate social responsibility more than just a requirement to be checked off a list: we work to make it a shared mindset. To achieve this objective, we are also developing newer and more effective ways to address training and awareness initiatives in the field of CSR, promoting experiential training programmes that provide a continuous learning experience for all people in the group.