Membership

The association has around 150 members, all of whom are in-house lawyers.

Status

Spanish in-house lawyers are fully integrated into the Spanish legal profession. As a result, they have the same status in relation to issues such as rights of audience and legal professional privilege as their private practice counterparts. The Spanish Company Lawyers Association (SCLA) is therefore a purely voluntary association, separate from any official Spanish bar associations.

Current Membership

The SCLA is run by a five-member board, currently headed by Juan Pablo Nieto Mengotti. The board meets once a month to discuss the association’ business. The association also has an annual general meeting, open to all members.

Benefits of Membership

Because the SCLA is a comparatively small association, it does not run its own education and training programme. In reality, this is not a problem, because Spanish in-house lawyers can benefit from education and training programmes run by their local bars.

Instead, the SCLA mainly acts as an informal point of contact for those interested in hearing about the perspective of the in-house lawyer. The SCLA has a good working relationship with the Spanish Bar, who consults with the SCLA on matters of interest to corporate counsel. The SCLA also collects and publishes research that might be relevant to in-house lawyers – such as recent report from Deloitte, benchmarking many aspects of how Spanish in-house legal departments are run.

International links

The SCLA joined the European Company Lawyers Association (ELCA) – the umbrella organisation of in-house lawyers’ associations in Europe – on 11 April 2008. ECLA campaigns to improve the status of European corporate counsel, with a specific focus on legal privilege.

Current hot topics

SCLA president, Juan Pablo Nieto Mengotti, says the two of the most important challenges facing in-house lawyers are career progression and legal privilege. On the first point, he explains that Spanish in-house lawyers do not always have a clear career path within their companies, or information available to help them make informed career decisions. This is one area where SCLA can help, by acting as an informal resource for its members. On the issue of legal privilege, Mr Nieto Mengotti says that, while Spanish in-house lawyers already have access to privilege as part of their bar membership, he supports ECLA’s campaign for all European in-house lawyers to obtain this right.

Mr Nieto Mengotti also believes that all in-house lawyers should adhere to a single, Europe-wide, code of ethics. He says that working for an organisation run by non-lawyers poses specific ethical challenges, which are not always addressed by ethical codes aimed at private practitioners.