About

Having dedicated the last 20 years to operating as a specialist lawyer within the energy sector, as well as a company director of businesses located within this area, Flavio Porro believes the modern energy general counsel has to amass a wide range of skills around the sector in order to operate at maximum efficiency: ‘It is relevant and worth reporting that to be a general counsel in today’s challenging markets a lawyer should prove to have accrued experience in a law firm, in the upstream market, and in a structured department of a big contractor (or a reputable downstream or utilities company)’. Having assembled a multi-specialised and multicultural team that is fundamentally flexible and able to meet the demanding requirements of KNM Group, Porro is extremely pleased with the team’s performance in support of the company’s objectives. ‘The Group we work for is meeting the same uncertainty of the whole industry’, he says, ‘and the legal department I am driving has been forced to actively assist the company and the Group in good times as well as in bad; that means the working attitude had to change on different occasions between the “development direction” and the “need to protect”, two aspects which sometimes have different requirements. This has affected the company and the Group not only under the profile of the quality of the legal assistance provided but also in terms of being capable to be more and more adaptive and understand the scenario the management is looking into’. A keen networker with finely tuned interpersonal skills, Porro counts ‘the chance I had to set up an impressive network of lawyers and professionals’ as the biggest privilege he has enjoyed in his career.