Focus on: new challenges for a general counsel

Traditionally, in-house lawyers have been devoted to providing legal support to their companies, being an essential source of comprehensive knowledge on the core business and on the applicable regulatory framework.

However, the pandemic has triggered a change in the way companies do business, posing new challenges for in-house lawyers. These changes have led us to creatively adapt our activities to face these new challenges.

Besides having a high technical legal and business knowledge, an in-house lawyer in the role general counsel must incorporate new elements and tools, which allow to connect more efficiently and dynamically technical legal topics with the core business of our companies, and the impacts that they produce in our communities. This way, the design and implementation of corporate policies in the areas of compliance, ESG, equality and diversity, as well as the use of new tech tools, have become an essential challenge in our daily functions.

The side effects of these changes are not only assessed and valued by our companies, investors and customers, but also by the community in general. In this context, in Echeverría Izquierdo, the general counsel plays a key leadership role not only in the design and implementation of these policies, but also in communicating them to all the relevant stakeholders.