About

Valentina Moreno Aristeguieta joined Uber as the legal director for Central America and Panama when the role was first created in the region. ‘It implied a big change for the company to go from having mainly external counsel support to having an in-house lawyer’, Moreno highlights. After identifying the main legal needs and allocating legal resources more efficiently, she led a process of transformation from operating reactively to mitigate legal risks, to operating more preventatively. She achieved this by documenting procedures, identifying trends, implanting self-service tools and most importantly giving training to the business on key issues. Although she assumed her position in 2016, working for a fast paced technology company has meant she has hit the ground running, immediately working on a number of exciting and highly-anticipated projects rolled out in the last two years. Amongst these are the launch of the Uber ridesharing function in El Salvador in July 2017, as well as the launch of UberEats in Costa Rica in December 2017, in Guatemala in June 2018 and in Panama in July 2018. She has acknowledged the importance of knowing and learning about the industry in which the business operates in, making this a priority, she has consequently added value to the legal opinions given to the internal clients. She has also managed risk efficiently, making the necessary and correct analysis of legal risk, by ‘looking for innovative alternatives, using a correct risk communication and assuming the personal risk of raising a recommendation’. Moreno came from a successful 12 year career at the largest privately held corporation in the US in terms of revenue, Cargill, where she assumed different roles in the legal department as a generalist lawyer with responsibilities in Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador and Central America.