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?

A well-conceived legal management has among its strategic pillars the prevention and management of crises or periods of instability. During my career, I have been faced with periods of internal and external instability, as well as relevant crises such as serious accidents or environmental impacts of the operation. From these experiences, I learned that crises must be addressed, at least, on two fronts: the immediate one, aimed at containing the crisis and controlling the extent of its effects; and the long-term, for the incorporation of the learning from that experience for the future. The strategy of Falabella’s legal management is precisely to be an enabler of businesses for their adaptation, development and viability in the long term. Therefore, our approach in each decision is not to obtain immediate profits or triumphs, but to reach the solutions that best adapt to the general objectives of the company.

What measures has your company taken to embed sustainability practices into its core business operations, and how does the role of the general counsel contribute to driving and ensuring sustainable practices within the company?

At Grupo Falabella we have been working for several years to incorporate sustainable development guidelines into the core of our businesses. In this sense, we have relevant active commitments, with clear goals and actions for each of the businesses. The role of the legal manager in achieving these objectives is manifested in two main aspects: from modelling the behaviours of individuals, generating influence so that the sustainability variable permeates all the decisions that are adopted; and, from the practical aspect, generating legal instruments to meet and enforce said goals or commitments. To this end, our work has focused on investigating and advancing regulatory trends, creating alliances, training teams, and linking our opinions and decisions to the fulfilment of our strategy and purpose as a business.

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?

Without a doubt, generative AI. It is a train that is already moving and the modeling of a long-term strategy in legal management must be aligned with the daily use of this type of tool to allow people to allocate their time and skills to higher-level tasks. added value and that are more directly connected with the function of contributing to modeling behaviors and ensuring the sustainability of businesses over time.

In this search, for several years we have been working as a team on projects that allow us to incorporate generative AI into our usual processes, such as, for example, a tool for predicting judicial results, the development of which still requires a lot of work in feeding and training to generate reliable results, and a massive document review tool that allows us to shorten the times spent searching for key words, concepts or clauses in large quantities of documents, which is already allowing us to enjoy its benefits for preventive and security purposes. audit. Personally, my current goal is to train in prompting, addressing what is, in my opinion, the main paradigm shift that this new technology gives us, which is learning to ask the right questions.