What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

Our legal team operates from our Chilean headquarters in six different Latin American jurisdictions. We handle legal matters ranging from day-to-day operations, such as labour law and consumer law, to financing. As in-house counsel for a technology start-up, we have an entrepreneurial mindset that allows us to operate in a demanding and fast-paced business environment. As such, we focus on efficiency and prevention, without compromising legal standards and compliance.

Looking forward, what technological advancements do you feel will impact the role of in-house legal teams in the future the most? Which have you found most useful in your legal team?

We pride ourselves on adopting a legal operations approach. We automate the flow of commercial contracts ourselves, by using non-code tools that were already available to the company. We were able to reduce the time spent by the commercial and legal teams exchanging information, negotiating, and closing key contracts. By doing this ourselves there was no impact on our budget and the engineering team was able to maintain their focus.

As we live in a fast-paced world today, what skills will a corporate legal team need to succeed in the modern in-house industry?

The legal issues that a company addresses tend to be repeated over time. This, in turn, sets the conditions for creating a strong review bias with respect to how those issues are addressed. So, in my view, a successful corporate legal team must be restless in avoiding the status quo. It must be always looking for new ways of approaching problems. Whether it is leveraging technology, as we have done at Justo, or simply being curious and creative in finding novel solutions. I would argue that these principles also apply when the company operates in uncharted territory.

How do you suggest in-house lawyers build strong relationships with business partners?

I would argue there are four steps to building strong relationships with business partners. The first is to recognise that lawyers and business partners may have different mindsets, motivations, and styles. These differences could be problematic in principle, but if addressed with shared goals in mind, potential frictions can be mitigated or even eliminated. The second step is to build trust by sharing information, offering honest feedback, and compromising when the situation calls for it. The third step is to keep in mind that there is a delicate balance to be struck between strict compliance with the law and ethics and doing business. Finally, there are not two parties in the relationship, but one team in which each player must play a different role to achieve the same goal.

How important is choosing to work with external lawyers who align with your company’s values? Are you likely to reconsider what firms you work with based on this?

We have operations in six countries and the team only has Chilean qualified lawyers. Therefore, working with external lawyers has proven to be key for the company, especially when opening a new market and during the initial stages of the learning curve. Making the right choice at the beginning is straightforward, knowing when and why to change is the tricky part. I will not hesitate to reconsider an external firm if their values are not aligned with those of the company.