How do you handle legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis, and how do you ensure they align with maintaining the organisation’s resilience? 

My managerial style, if I may call it that, is to, during periods of instability, which often involve resource scarcity, promote people, give proper recognition and rewards, and deal with the fear of possible job loss. My approach is still to focus on managing the team and trying to keep engagement high. First and foremost, by fostering professional growth and skill development among the staff, making sure to optimise their individual skills, because each person has different aptitudes. Some are better suited for handling complex mixed transactions, for example, involving both corporate matters and a mix of service contracts and corporate operations like business unit transfers. Others may have more vertical expertise in specific topics like general issues or other areas. I aim to keep their intellectual interest alive. From this perspective, because in companies like ours, people spend so many hours at work, it is not just for economic satisfaction, but also for intellectual fulfillment, if you will. Maximising people attitude makes the Team working efficiently, reduces the risk of performance issues and of cutting. 

We have also been taking advantage of the digitalisation of the legal structure to gain time efficiency. 

Can you share some cases or transactions you’ve worked on this year, even in broad terms? 

Some of the main projects I have been involved in concern a bid in the banking focused on application management services which, due to client requests, required creating a joint venture with the client itself, where we hold a minority stake. This joint venture handles services for the group on a captive basis, while we subcontract work to it. Since we are minority stakeholders, we ensure our revenue comes from the work we do. It was a complex process both for establishing the joint venture and managing governance issues, as we needed to protect our minority position with early exit clauses in case of losses. Then there was the whole service contract side, with new technologies like generative AI and coding aspects involved. It was a complex transaction with people-related issues. 

How have legal tech tools enhanced the overall efficiency of your legal team? 

I have to say that in a corporation like mine, tech investments are decided centrally at the American level, though some initiatives do trickle down to us. 

There have been several legaltech tools introduced, some particularly relevant to my focus area, which is external contracting. Accenture works on a project, and everything has to be captured in a contract. For example, we recently introduced a Contract Assistant Review tool that uses AI to flag risks and suggest alternative wordings. This has been particularly useful in time-pressured situations when we receive tight deadlines for RFPs. The tool significantly saves time. 

Another tool is more of a search intelligence system, which helps us by pulling historical contract data, especially when working with long-standing clients like Telecom Italia. Instead of manually searching old SharePoint files, we use this tool to search for key clauses, which increases efficiency significantly. 

Finally, I should mention another investment made in technology: in the M&A space, AI tools have been used to streamline due diligence processes by classifying contracts and improving overall accuracy. However, I follow contracting more closely, so that is where my focus is.