In conversation with Maria Irene Perruccio
Legal Counsel at Webuild
My name is Maria Irene Perruccio. I’m Italian. I’m double qualified in Paris and Milan. I’m Legal Counsel at Webuild, which is the largest construction group in Italy. We are a family of about 80,000 employees, and we have a portfolio of work of a few billion euros, depending on the years.
What are your legal department’s main challenges?
For my company, the main challenges are mostly at the outset of an arbitration. There are mostly four challenges :
- Select a good counsel,
- Select a good expert that can work well with the counsel,
- Select a good arbitrator, which is very important, and
- Keep the costs under control.
So as you can imagine, Jus Mundi is extremely useful in the selection of numbers one, two, and three.
It’s useful in the selection of counsel because you just type in the search bar and you have a ton of information at your disposal. For the selection of experts as well, which is something I was not very experienced in. And especially so for the selection of arbitrators because you put your case in the hands of these professionals and you want to know what their experience is.
As we all know, arbitration is quite an opaque market; not all the information is easily available. I had the chance to work with an international law firm before and they have a pretty large network, so it was very easy to ask for information about a candidate and receive a ton of feedback. When working with smaller firms, it’s not the same: they usually don’t have the same access to information.
By putting together all the possible available information, Jus Mundi is rendering access to information in international arbitration more democratic, especially when it deals with selecting an arbitrator. So it’s definitely very useful for us!
What is Jus Mundi’s biggest value add?
The biggest added value, I would say, is mainly in the selection of the arbitrators. Again, you work with big law firms, they have information available because they can rely on a larger network of their own firm, their own experience, etc. But in certain countries, we work with local counsel that are not the typical big American Anglo-Saxon law firms and they don’t have the same access to information.
So, most of the time, thanks to Jus Mundi, I can complement the information that they have on the possible candidates that we are considering. So, since the selection of arbitrators is a team effort between the internal legal counsel and the external counsel, we definitely complement each other in this work. Jus Mundi is very useful in this respect.
How does Webuild’s legal department use Jus Mundi?
The first feature we use – which I did not consider immediately and was a very good surprise for me – is Wiki Notes. It’s very useful! For example, we had a meeting where we had to discuss a situation where security for costs was to come into play. Since it’s not a topic that I deal with every day, it was very useful to just find a Wiki Note, ready to be read and shared with my colleagues and very exhaustive with all the information we needed.
Number two is certainly Jus Connect. The archive of arbitrators’ profiles has a very rich collection of information about the cases they dealt with, and other related documents that concern public information about the candidates.
Also very important is the Conflict Checker that Jus Mundi offers. Especially when it’s someone else appointing or nominating a member of the arbitral panel (the opposing party or the institution), it’s very important to verify that that candidate really disclosed all the possible information that might or might not, one day, create problems as to the enforcement of the award or problems related to challenges. So that’s really one of the reasons why, in the end, we decided to subscribe to Jus Mundi‘s services.
How did you convince your management to unlock the budget for Jus Mundi?
The way I convinced my management to unlock the necessary funds to subscribe to Jus Mundi was by explaining to them that access to information in international arbitration is not so democratic yet. For better or worth, it is what it is.
Jus Mundi can count on probably the largest collection of data possible, especially on arbitrators’ profiles, which is what, in the end, matters the most, in my opinion. So, I explained to my colleagues how unique this opportunity was. Also, thanks to Jus Mundi‘s staff who provided a very clear and convincing chart of comparison with other services, they decided to go for Jus Mundi because the quality/price ratio was definitely the best.
About Jus Connect
Jus Connect is THE arbitration platform connecting legal departments to law and expert firms.
With a diverse selection of +50,000 professionals and +7,800 firms listed, use data-driven profiles to quickly find the most relevant arbitrators, lawyers, or experts for your unique needs.
It all comes down to our data backed by Jus Mundi, the most comprehensive and up-to-date database of international arbitration cases and treaties today.
That’s why we’re the #1 choice for selecting legal professionals by:
- Companies like Total Energies and WeBuild, and
- Governments like the United Kingdom’s Department for International Trade and South Korea’s Ministry of Justice.
