About

Legal director Erica Barbagalo leads a team of 23 employees at Monsanto Brasil, an agriculture and biotechnology company. Barbagalo has been praised for her role in revolutionising the legal department and ensuring that integration within the business has increased. As Barbagalo states, she has helped ‘position the legal department as part of the business, working closer to the overall organisation and helped the department to work as a team, without silos’. In this way, she has instilled a strong ethos of teamwork throughout the establishment, which has led to the success of ‘several M&A transactions and joint ventures’. Barbagalo has additionally provided significant support for the company as it navigates new regulations and government actions. The growing influence of the legal division at Monsanto Brasil has seen the department demonstrate its intrinsic value to the organisation on a daily basis; this stems from the communicative and collaborative approach that Barbagalo has engendered. She is known to have a passion for the development of personnel within Monsanto, assisting with their continued learning and setting the tone for integrity and inclusion. Barbagalo believes that the most enjoyable feature about her role is having the ‘opportunity to actually make the difference in people’s lives’.