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

I have been recently working in several confidential projects aimed to expand the company’s portfolio in new channels. I am involved in the design and execution of e-commerce projects, both direct to consumers and B2B platforms, with all associated aspects, including competition assessment and mitigation plan, privacy, and consumer law. Besides, this year we have been actively exploring and working in new business models associated with third parties. Finally, particularly in the Argentinean market, I have led legal aspects of several financing transactions, mainly investing, hedging and saving opportunities to protect cash value in a market highly exposed to forex regulation, inflation and devaluation.

Do you use any “legal tech” products and do you find them a helpful management device?

Yes, Unilever’s legal function has a contract automation tool, which has been designed and deployed in 2017, and is under constant enhancement to meet and simplify business users experience. We have worked in the contract templates, plug in clauses, escalation triggers and negotiation guidelines. This contract tool has successfully reduced rutinary tasks, increased the contract coverage and free legal team’s agenda to focus on strategic and impact driven matters.

However, it entailed a cross functional effort to change internal contracting culture as well as to reshape legal services roles and expectations. In addition, our business users have a legal bot to answer frequent asked questions, and access simple fill-in notes and templates. We are constantly monitoring users experience and needs to improve our tech tools.

How much influence do you, as a general counsel, have on the diversity and inclusions policies of your organisation?

Our company has a diversity and inclusion team, that works both within our geographies and within the legal function. These teams meet regularly to create and execute diversity and inclusion initiatives, aimed at strengthening our internal diversity and inclusion culture, as well as to collaborate with our community’s inclusion agenda.

A member of our Argentina’s legal team is actively involved in an external forum with the purpose of addressing gender violence within labour and domestic environments.