Team size: 30

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?

First, it is key to be part of the war room in a crisis, understand that all we do is contingent and requires jointly with the business view, a reputational, legal and sustainability view, enriching the diagnosis helps designing the right processes and lower the regulatory risks of the crisis. Many times, just by having the right communication of the answer to a problem, reduces enormously the reputational, regulatory and legal risks of the crisis.

To that effect, the inter area coordination requires not only bringing down the right message, but first understanding the ways and forms of the team, how they execute the task they are responsible for, in a crisis, the forms and ways are critical, reflectors are focussed on you, and any mistake is a potential crisis, understanding the 360 of each process that touches a stakeholder and planning how to minimise the impact on those stakeholders is the first way reduce minimise the impact of the crisis. Contains how decisionmakers judge you and helps to minimise the damage on your reputation and brand.

At the end, the organisation, not only the decisionmakers need to understand that the strategy in a business is only 0NE, there is no such thing as the product strategy, the marketing strategy, the legal strategy, the financial strategy or brand strategy, all actions in a company reflect THE STRATEGY OF THE COMPANY and the level of consciousness of that fact and its execution, will probably define the success of the strategy and the company.

In that context, the legal standards are a good compass of the minimum standards a business requires to have its social license to operate but is far from what is required to be successful.

Beyond the obvious legal compliance, the definition of standards is a more complex assessment than the linearity of taking the standard and applying it to the business, the understanding of the business, its scope and especially its impacts, help to define not only the objectives or KPIs but the proper implementation of controls and communication.

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?

The first step was to decide at the executive team level if the organisation would or not adopt a sustainability approach to its strategy. On our experience, this decision, to adopt a Sustainability commitment must be done top down, if there is no commitment and adoption from the top management, no VP, director, manager of the sustainability team will be able to be successful in implementing a real sustainability strategy. Having the commitment of the executive team, we move forward to cross all the organisations touch points with different stakeholders and raised the impacts of the business, and with that input, we were able to map and prioritise the impacts in a materiality matrix and put together KPIs and goals for each area, with a focus on ESG impacts. On our experience we started by policies, but the game changer was to include ESG KPIs in the business areas goals. Later, we put together a team to follow up on the performance of these goals and Last, but not least, annually we issue a report informing our performance with a ESG view, what is critical for the accountability and credibility of the commitment towards the sustainability strategy.

The implementation of a sustainability strategy based on the impacts of the business as prioritise by the executive committee follows many tools, such as policies, implementation of educational and training programs on sensitive matters such as Inclusion, non-discrimination, efficient use of energy and waist and others. In our case, the general counsel has been the leader of the sustainability team, and given our nearness to all what nonmarket and non-business and financial stakeholders relationship management we have, it has been natural for the organisation to understand that lead. We must also recognise that most of the sustainability standards reflect in norms and due diligence efforts which are natural for the GCs team to follow and commit to, helping to promote and embed in the companies processes and contracts these commitments.

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?

We believe that the different tools using AI are changing and helping enormously the legal profession, not just on the obvious, which is the document management, but collaboration, evidence, systematisation of controls and processes, specially in the compliance world, give life to a much richer and deeper legal support to the business, and much more faster and time to market way, what has always been one of the pains of our professional experience.

I would add a special space for the quality of translation tools, the increase in the capacity, speed and quality of the translation of legal and non-legal documents has been surprising but requires a thorough follow-up on the policy of its use, and inclusion of sensitive information on the treatment of the documents worked on.

How do you prioritise diversity and inclusion within your legal department, and what initiatives have you implemented to foster a more inclusive and equitable work environment?

First, we have decided that every position opened, requires parity in search and final list, based on a gender perspective. Second, we follow up EDI initiatives and promote a fair and equitable treatment inside the legal area and we foster the same to the company. We share a deep non-discrimination sense and inclusive view of the standards we promote inside the organisation.

In your opinion, what are the main trends that are salient in your country currently (these can be legal, political, economy or business-based)?

The more evident today, is security, the crime level has overpassed all records. This has been directly linked with a big immigration issue. Also, the political landscape, and future development of democracy and free market are also top of mind.

I would say that confidence on the economic future of the country is under a big question mark, pushed by a lack of confidence on the educational level, health and pension system the three of which are probably at its low and at great risk of a deep legal change.

Inclusion of women in the working field, under the great risk of the impact of AI, and other TI or system tools in labour and in general are extremely relevant.

Digital Society, democracy and family trends affected by digital society is something raising its sensitivity. This is being expressed in bills in congress towards putting limits and regulating the ethics on the use of Internet and AI, protection of data, impacts of digital frauds, raising the legal standard of internet service to a Public Service. Impact in education of digital tools and ways and interrelationships of the student’s ecosystem. All new impacts which slowly but surely is gathering great awareness and attention.