Specialising in transformation
Former real estate lawyer Gloria Sánchez Soriano is one of a rare breed of innovation specialists within corporate legal departments. She talks to GC about her unique role and how she believes legal departments will need to evolve to be fit for the future.
When our group general counsel, Óscar García Maceiras, joined two years ago, he came with the idea of renovating and transforming the legal department. But Santander as a business is also in a huge process of transformation. Maceiras had a concern that we in our legal department in the market – and I think in many other legal departments – were working the same way that we were 100 years ago. We have legal databases, word processing, some digital resources – but we weren’t doing anything special. So the transformational project he envisioned was not only to implement a range of technologies, but also to foster a savvier legal department, with fewer pain points and better cooperation, coordination and efficiency.
The head of transformation role was created only one year ago. There was a need in our legal department to transform the way we work and to start implementing legal technologies, but also to improve things, not only with technology, but with more measures to improve processes and to take a look at how we work with people in the team – which types of lawyers we need now and which type of profiles we will be needing in the future.
