Ana has experience as a lawyer, teacher, mediator and organizational developer. She combines 20 years of experience with an exceptional triple curriculum, as a former IT industry executive, an ADR neutral and trainer, but also as an executive coach (she has 800 hours of coaching and is at the PCC level in the ICF accreditation). She is a founder of Convirgente, the first Appropriate Dispute Resolution Consulting Company in Portugal. Ana is a graduate from UAL Lisbon and has a Master of Law (2008). She followed Mediation Courses in several institutions in UK, France, Portugal, USA, and Australia. Ana is an Accredited Mediator for ADR group, panelist of CPR, she is listed as an internationally recognized commercial mediator in the Who's Who Legal since 2011 and is part of the Portuguese mediators list of “Julgados de Paz”. Ana is also an ADR trainer in several Universities and with the European Academy of Law (ERA). Being very active across frontiers and cultures, she has focused her practice in the last years on the impact of online technology on the skills of ADR neutrals and has delivered lectures on that topic in several conferences. What struck most of people that know Ana is her intercultural prowess: she has lived, worked and traveled in many countries, and she recognizes and adapts easily to a wide range of different demands and settings. She is a lawyer and mediator (like so many) but her senior management experience at Microsoft has equipped her with a ready understanding of the nature of cross-border business and its complexities in a globalized business environment. Ana is an ideas person, but her deep roots in business and also in the law give her the unique ability to put those ideas in ways that resonate with business, while assisting business people to think beyond the usual boundaries of problem-solving. She is trilingual, another great asset in the English-, Portuguese- and French-speaking worlds.

BUSINESS EXPERIENCE:

• Customer Service Director of Microsoft France, with a division of more than 100 people;
• Director of Critical Support Service Centre of Microsoft Europe;
• Founder of Convirgente, the first Appropriate Dispute Resolution Consulting Company in Portugal. Ana is the President of the ICFML – Instituto de Certificação e Formação de Mediadores Lusófonos, a non-profit organization competent for the certification of Portuguese speaking mediators applying for the IMI accreditation and a member of the Portuguese FMC - Federação Nacional de Mediação de Conflitos.

Ana also works inside the organizations world, delivering collaboration management training to several large and medium Global organizations and assisting Senior Executives and Lawyers in developing their conflict management and negotiation skills, both in person and online. Ana has an active role in helping Asian subsidiaries of Global organizations integrating mediation techniques in their leadership framework model and in promoting internal ADR as a tool to multicultural conflict resolution. The best way to summarize Ana’s character is to say she is passionate, intuitive, generous and obstinate. She actually lives in Kuala Lumpur with her husband and has 2 children, Marie, 30, who lives in Sydney and Thomas, 12, who lives with his parents.