About

DaVita is an established healthcare multinational that recently established a presence in Colombia. Its youth and incredible growth potential allows its senior leaders to innovate and create new strategies and new ways to do things inside and outside the company. Helena Alvarez Uribe is legal director, and through her rise to this position has proven herself to senior colleagues. She held her first senior legal position in the company when she was 29 years old, and epitomises the youthfulness and fresh approach DaVita is about. DaVita, being a relatively new company in Colombia, has needed to develop its legal function, something at which Alvarez excelled. She described it as an ‘amazing challenge, because it allows you to implement improved versions of the processes and procedures. Innovation, adaptability and consistency are fundamental skills you need to develop to strategically support the operation of a new company, while focusing on giving the accurate legal advice that a new company needs to ensure its development and success’. At DaVita Alvarez has been focused on creating new technological tools that allow her team to optimize time and effectiveness for internal stakeholders, such as through contract templates, interactive tools for specific legal documents request and standardised processes. This gives the team more time to think in a strategic legal way rather than in operative tasks. Alvarez thinks of her department as a globalised legal support area, giving an added value for the international legal team. She has implemented a new strategical approach to the business because as she says, ‘the corporate world obliges us to think much more as risk managers, but also, as finance allies, with strong negotiation skills, flexibility and accurate legal forecasting abilities without losing the scope of legal and compliance dispositions that may apply in each case’. Highlights of her successes include leading arbitration processes with the company’s former joint venture partners, the upcoming conclusion of this will be a big break for the company in Colombia, the acquisition of two renal care clinics in Colombia in the last six months, and the launch of new property and brand operations in Peru, Colombia and Venezuela for retail products. Finally, she is proud of her team for giving impeccable advice on the restructuring of a subsidiary company in Ecuador without any legal claims associated. These successes highlight Alvarez’s leadership and teambuilding skills which she highlights as, ‘a basic tool for all leaders. The continuous development in professional, academic and personal perspectives, [benefits] not only legal managers but managers of any area inside the companies. Specifically for legal teams, the construction of a good work team gives you the chance to work on a multidisciplinary perspective and give stronger legal advice’.