Team size: 13

What has been the number one challenge that has impacted you over the past year?

Today’s crises – Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, rising inflation, deepening food and energy insecurity, and accelerating climate change – have affected many businesses over the past year and the work of in-house legal teams. In addition, the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated innovation and technological advancements to solve all kinds of social distancing obstacles. Technology, cybersecurity, and data privacy are nowadays implicated in most of the legal work and has changed the way businesses operate. Moreover, the pandemic lockdown has elevated remote working, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and virtual reality, enabling business and legal teams to work more efficiently and effectively, freeing up time to focus on higher value-added tasks.

Therefore, in-house legal teams and general counsel over the past years had to address a series of unique and complex challenges, related to innovation, technological advancements and improvements in healthcare, and new work arrangements for work-life balance and mental health in their business and legal teams without neglecting the importance of climate change, inequalities and ESG reporting disclosures as well as other compliance, corporate governance, and ethical and social responsibility issues within the business and also within third parties such as suppliers and contractors for building strong and sustainable business relationships, particularly in developing countries like Peru where poverty and corruption levels are high, affecting not only politics but also the economy and society as a whole. Compliance with all rules and regulations (which includes product quality, health, safety, environmental, data security and all kinds of regulations) has become even more critical. Working towards a compliance culture in a country like Peru is undoubtedly a significant challenge and (as general counsel of Cementos Pacasmayo and responsible for the legal, compliance, quality, health, safety, environmental department) has been my number one challenge over the past year.

Looking forward, what technological advancements do you feel will impact the role of in-house legal teams in the future the most?

I feel that the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning has already impacted us, (for example, the use of ChatGPT and others) but will impact us even more the role of in-house legal teams in the future. Legal teams have to analyse large amounts of legal and contractual data and process vast amounts of information in a short period, identify patterns and trends, and make more precise predictions about the outcome of a judicial or arbitration case or a corporate transaction. AI and machine learning will definitely continue to help in the automation of those legal processes for instance through smart contracts, which will automate repetitive and low-complexity tasks, enabling legal teams to focus on more strategic and complex issues.

What is a cause, business related or otherwise, that you care about, and why?

I care about promoting compliance and awareness in ethical and integrity issues and the compliance culture in our company and throughout our value chain. In addition, I care about developing better legal professionals and, above all, better people in our business and society.