Manuel is an experienced, dual-qualified privacy lawyer specialising in how data protection law applies to emerging technologies, with in-depth expertise in AI and adtech. His practice spans advisory, transactional, and contentious matters across privacy, data protection, and technology regulation, with a focus on delivering practical, business-oriented advice.

Manuel regularly advises technology companies – from early-stage platforms to global market leaders – on complex GDPR and ePrivacy compliance issues. His work often focuses on the practical application of data protection principles to innovative or evolving business models, particularly where products rely on large-scale data collection and processing. 

He also uses his product counselling experience to support clients in designing privacy-compliant user journeys and product architectures, ensuring that data processing activities meet requirements around transparency, user choice mechanisms, lawful basis, and purpose limitation. He is particularly well-versed in addressing challenges around online tracking technologies, including cookies, SDKs, and device fingerprinting.

His recent practice has increasingly focused on helping clients developing AI models and technologies navigate the evolving regulatory landscape. He additionally supports companies’ adoption of AI solutions across their products and workflows, helping them address the associated compliance and risk management challenges.

With significant experience advising technology companies on complex regulatory investigations, including direct engagement with data protection authorities, he regularly supports clients in managing regulatory risk, crafting responses to inquiries, and engaging strategically with regulators. He also has experience advising on contentious data subject rights requests, particularly where the legal or operational risks are heightened.

Further, he has often assisted clients in negotiating data processing agreements, adtech contracts, and other personal data arrangements, as well as helping them design data transfer frameworks that align with their regulatory requirements and commercial objectives.

Manuel’s work highlights include:

• Counselling a major global tech company as both external and in-house counsel through a long-running regulatory investigation spanning complex privacy and competition issues. 

• Supporting a leading AI company’s response to regulatory enquiries concerning risk mitigation and safeguards in model training. 

• Guiding a blockchain tech company through nuanced GDPR issues, including accountability, pseudonymisation, and the allocation of processing roles in a decentralised context. 

• Negotiating multiple data processing agreements to help set up a global laboratory network underpinning COVID-19 clinical trials.

Manuel brings valuable in-house perspective from various secondment stints at leading technology and media companies, where he worked closely with legal and product teams. His practice is further informed by his prior academic and litigation background in IP law, all of which provides him with a strong, solutions-oriented approach to advising clients at the intersection of data, technology, and innovation.