About

Gabriela Álvarez de la Fuente was singled out by nominators as having ‘very sharp analysis, combining complex legal issues with an impressive commercial approach whilst having very quick turnaround and feedback’, which is ‘extremely valuable considering the wide range of her responsibilities both in territory and scope’. Utilising these skills in both past and present roles Álvarez is the current regional legal director for the Latin American Southern Cone at Colgate-Palmolive, covering Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Chile. She covers this broad geographical remit for the consumer goods company by managing one internal lawyer and several external law firm relationships in each of the aforementioned countries. Álvarez joined Colgate-Palmolive in 2016 having spent the majority of her in-house career as the legal and compliance manager for Business Centre South at BASF, where she managed a team of five people covering four countries. Spending 12 years and accomplishing several outstanding results at the multinational chemicals company, Álvarez created the internal legal department in the region from scratch, which reduced lawsuits involving the company by an impressive 85%. At BASF, Álvarez was involved in numerous projects to improve the efficiency of the fledgling department, including the ‘incorporation of a contract alert system’ and the management of ‘several successful M&A processes with different companies acquired by the group’. She was proactive in ensuring the legal staff fulfilled their potential, and organised different legal and compliance training courses to encourage constant learning. Her efforts were validated upon Álvarez’s launch of an internal “Legal Service Satisfaction Survey”, which measured the quality of advice as perceived by internal clients and produced ‘very good’ results. She also created an innovative measure of value calculation of the legal team’s performance; a ‘cost avoidance’ key performance indicator demonstrated to business peers the value of the work the team was performing. Álvarez explains that this ‘mainly included the savings in external legal fees, the collection in lawsuits, and the successful negotiations or cases won at court’.