Top Spanish firm Garrigues has announced that labour and employment lawyer Rosa Zarza will be its next senior partner, becoming the first women to hold the position at the firm. 

Zarza will take up the role 1 January 2024 and succeeds Javier Ybáñez, who has been senior partner since 2019 and will continue to be the partner in charge of Garrigues’ Latin American practice, the firm said. 

Garrigues also announced that it had promoted 16 lawyers to equity partner across its Spanish and international offices. The cohort matched the firm’s 2022 round in terms of size but saw the proportion of women drop from half last year to 38% this time. 

Like last year most of the promotions went to lawyers based in Garrigues’ Spanish offices, including three in its Madrid headquarters, two apiece in Seville, Valencia and Barcelona and one each in Vigo, Bilbao and San Sebastián. 

The international promotions, which last year were restricted to Latin America, saw corporate lawyer David Jelicz move up in Warsaw and Jaafar Laidi welcomed in Casablanca in the dispute resolution practice. There were also two promotion in Portugal across Lisbon and Oporto.

Garrigues’ corporate and M&A practice saw the most promotions, with six. The practice had a strong 2022, working on 198 deals in Spain and 39 in Portugal worth a total of more than €11bn – an effort that saw TTR Data rank the firm in first place by number of M&A transactions in the Iberian market and second by deal value. 

The firm’s tax team saw the second-largest number of promotions, welcoming five new partners, while three moved up in the labour and employment practice and the final two promotions were in the dispute resolution team. 

Garrigues also pointed to the five lawyers it promoted to international partners over the course of this year, including tax lawyers Mónica Bolaños and Ignacio Campino, who were promoted in Bogotá and Santiago de Chile respectively. Lisbon-based João Lima Cluny moved up in the dispute resolution practice, while Mark English was promoted in the antitrust team in Brussels and corporate lawyer Manuel Groenewold got the nod in Mexico City. 

For her part Zarza has been with Garrigues since the beginning of her professional career in 1990. She is the global head of the firm’s labour and employment department, a member of its management committee and also leads its internal sustainability strategy as the head of Garrigues Sustainable. 

Garrigues said that as senior partner Zarza would be tasked with ensuring compliance with the firm’s internal policies and good governance, looking after its reputation and international positioning, and handling conflicts of interest in coordination with the firm’s executive chairman, Fernando Vives. 

Source: Global Legal Post