How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crises, and how does your legal strategy align with the broader business strategy to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

Probably the most simple, difficult and critical aspect is prioritising. While deceptively trivial and simple in principle, this is quite a difficult and essential task. An organisation has a wide variety of issues, most of them with a legal component. The larger the company, the larger the number and the broader the range of issues, naturally. These conditions lure us to dive straight to work trying to our way through everything until every issue is resolved. But rarely will there be enough time to solve them all. Here is where proper prioritising is key. Aligned with upper management and the business side, we must identify what constitutes the backbone of the organisation, and then begin working our way out of there. Each organisation and business will have different key issues, but if this is done properly and frequently, even if some issues are left unsolved, none of them will threaten the organisation.

What emerging technologies do you see as having the most significant impact on the legal profession in the near future, and how do you stay updated on these developments?

Hands down, Artificial Intelligence (AI). It may be what everybody is talking about, but there is a reason for that. We have been accustomed for some time now to having most of human knowledge at our disposal through the Internet. But the work was still ultimately done by us. We had to research, analyse, and write. AI changed that. Contracts, translations, internal policies, even simple emails and more can now be done automatically by just a few keystrokes, in just a fraction of the time. And these are just some basic functions from a free to access system. Industries progress when technology allows them to make more with less time, creating availability for doing more. The same is true for the legal profession, and many tasks which used to take a lot of time or that were performed by junior professionals can now be done automatically and without additional help. It is our current challenge to learn how to best use this new tool, and to adapt our professional practice to the efficiencies now available to us. This last part may be especially hard for us lawyers, for we are, in general, creatures of habit and slow to change.

In your opinion, what are the main trends that are salient in your country currently?

One of the main issues I see in my country are transparency and a deteriorating trust in institutions. Not so long ago we prided ourselves on being an honest country with, albeit slow, still properly functioning institutions. But in the last few years there’s been a change. Whether it is merely a change in perception, a realisation of what always was, or a real change in the system, we are more frequently seeing cases of improper conduct, decisions being influenced by outside forces, or lack of effectiveness of our institutions. One of the latest cases affected the Supreme Court, with the latest nominations of its new members being called to question. This, coupled with the loss of trust in our police and Congress, has caused a sentiment of general distrust in our legal system. Repairing this trust will be a long and arduous challenge.